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.