when it all fails

where is your heartbroken susana to keep fresh flowers upon your tomb, trinidad frausto? your lineage, frausto, who are they to hasten into your abandoned cemetery to strengthen your crumbling headstone, layer it anew with a vibrant torquoise and kill again the ever mounding fire ants? will you not beckon into your bosom, frausto, the hawk striking steeply upon the venom snakes coiled above your cold concrete slab, will you not claw wild against the gates of your heavens and come back, come back to see what your village has come to be? do you hear the horseless vaquero stumbling down the pale orange lit alleyway, drunk and muttering, tapping his golden belt buckle and wondering where things went wrong? only black cats now roam the streets frausto. the sands now are drifting your people away from you into the sunset cliffs. death here is like the breeze now. will you not come out of your dark devotion to your small stake out in the desert plain, come to your senile susana's side, sip from her mescal, kneel beside her in front of her saint shrine, watch your grandchildren dance with their young lovers in the town plaza, will you let this slip farther from you, frausto? will you rise, frausto! will you paint your skull gold and blood reds, will you storm into this town with bleached teeth blinding death grimaced and as strong as when you were laid low by time, will you not cloak yourself in the vibrant cloth of starved children swimming in the captured wild waters, of lovers losing virginity in the shadows, of the frenzy of people trying to save their souls? oh, frausto, the moon is alive once again and she does not see your silver bones on the march. frausto, she reaches out and touches the dust of a lily that for so long rested upon your aged crumbling pillow. frausto, through her cataract cloud eyes she sees your fear from her window shrink away into the distance, she sees the hawk soaring back into the morning rising.

no other world for your dead light

fastestar you are broken the people of the city are writhing in sweaty immortality their enemies, all of your fantastic ways to die encamped in the surrounding dusty hills, exhausted of ideas they're eating up stray rats their cunning weapons have turned to dull stones. fatestar you are weakened yon child born into a gilded bucket from a throned, disinterested queen squirms and wheezes out his tuberculosis lungs while you know we all know the babe needs be to grow, to harden and callous, to die vaingloriously on the barren battleground of his lover's heart. fatestar you are the spoke now no longer the center fatestar you are the hangman's rope now no longer the old sacred oak for no longer do us junkies seek your face in nebula we seek forgetting we seek an obliteration tantric, excessive, careless we scalp each other and paint our brains white with moonlight. once, fatestar, once you sent us to die upon wooden beams silhouetted on the burning horizon, you trembled when we pressed our fingertips into the earth, you shone your brightness upon the decapitated heads tumbling down from atop our temples. now, fatestar, now we all look to the hills we all see the tornado of buzzards vortexing above your ruination no need to race into the desert to find your body no need for burying you no need to see the fattening death birds pecking at the meat of your eyelids no need for our hearts are become feral, for we will burn the sky away ourselves, we will satiate infinite hunger and ravage the motherly soil into a grey, brittle lifelessness, no need for we have robbed you of strength and with it we will rape and impregnate the universe with an eternal impermanence

these fading things

they sewed a lion's heart in you, Ann, from the get go, they sewed it in tight and tried to keep you in a plastic cage for years. they gave you a label, Ann, and tried to keep you from knowing what there was to know. but I saw it coming, I knew you'd bust out. I saw you rampage out into the city streets and lay low the skyscrapers, cut them down out of your horizon just cos you wanted to see everything how it's supposed to be. Ann, I saw when you were leaving town on the only bridge out. You stopped there at the apex and listened to a distant train howling in the dark, I smelled it too Ann, the lingering reek of carbon fumes, vaporized poison, something so familiar, the residual exhaust of so many before you that have given up, accepted that, yes, maybe, they weren't supposed to know where they were really going. But you're not just passing through Ann, they're keeping something from you, so I followed you out of town and into the wild desert plains, I raced after you until thick clouding black covered the sky. I came upon you laid down, the rain catching in your eyelashes, pooling silver about you. I'd hope you wouldn't fall in love then and there but when those clouds cleared out, when those ringing sunshine bells tinctured the sound of morning come anew with gold, I heard those lion heart sutures strain and rust. I saw you go wild, as if in these shadows we cast you can see our infinite genealogy until another night disappears us, as if all that is hidden away from us can be harvested out of the winds and spun into the hangman's rope ever gently torqued about our throats as time passes as we keep falling from the heavens until the snap of our necks just before we land. I saw you unbound and fierce, rising back up the rope, a roman candle flaring untamed and charging into the night sprawl above you. Ann, I saw it all, the molten lead stars, the poacher's bullets shoot you down just before you kissed the cheek of your destroyer. I followed the arc of your meteor descent. I found you laid low empty handed and forlorn in a wilderness, the scavengers hungry and on the run. Ann, I excised your beast heart and threw your body into a nearby stream. I walk back into the city, heart in hand, listening for the sound of some broken thing on the verge of being born

travelling in tracks

Gabby, is that you, yonder calming your trembling bones with cigarettes, leaned up against the lonely yellow light post downtown while the cinco de mayo tejano beats slide from bass strings onto the dance floor, the trumpets vibrating the vaquero crowds, gyrating the señorita's hips. No babe, this isn't you. No, this couldn't be you, Gabby, this woman sitting in silence at your dinner table awaiting your man, ever late, ever suspicious of his whereabouts, it couldn't be you letting your heart go cold in anticipation of another night of swarming, innocuous dreams. No darling Gabby, this can't be you sitting with your soul so quiet and still listening to the church ring those godawful bells, to the rooster crowing, the late night freight train burning through town, listening with smoke leaking from your mouth and your babies breathing soft in their cribs. Gabby, dear, you're not the one waiting for everybody else's day to start up, are you? I asked about you girl. My oh my, they said the moon gave you the name of gold, they said I could find you between the ripples of the stream burning diamond bright, so honey, you know I dressed in my finest, I left town with much owed, much promised and a hope that I won't falter with you, wishing I won't fuck up like the last time when you floated off with the wind. So dearest Gabby, I'm miles and miles out of town and freezing in the desert like a shepherdless fool. But I found you, eventually Gabby, I found you naked with your arms up and bracing the stars above you anext the old seminole canyon where it meets the rio grande, where no man has been in eons. I found you out here in the dark staring toward all civilization writhing and degenerate in a cage of electricity and concrete. Oh girl, you know I'm burning my clothes for us, flaming up them old native cave paintings to a dancing fever cos they ain't got nothin for us in that yonder eden, cos babe you need to come here anext to me, you need to let them heavens slip on past, let them city blues fester and rot where they be. Jus acome over here honey and keep warm and come morning we'll scale down these cliffsides and slip on into the river we'll slip on into the flow and let the old gal take us to where we need to be