Qué escribir si la vida se pasa así. Emputado con la máquina. Puto que perdió el partido y sale reclamando la injusticia de la falta. Culpa suya que se vino todo abajo. No hay desfile aquí. La que al final escogen, la peor de todas. Nunca jamás dicen. Y la lengua la única patria, la que queda bajo el epidermis, en las entrañas polvorientas. La lengua evita la pelea. El futuro, cierto, imposible de olvidar. Salir de la casa, negar la influencia de la madre. Imaginar un lugar donde sí se puede viajar. Palabras solamente claro. Lengua, eres para mí. Me das menos lata. La lluvia me lo insistió al injuriarme. Vencido por. Esta lengua que no es mía esta tierra a la que no tengo ningún deber. Con la cual me hago el niño tonto perdido entre gigantes. Salida no hay. Ni aquí donde reaparecen los fantasmas. Pienso demasiado en inglés. Piensa la máquina. El futuro queda en los nubes, miedo a tener un algo. Amar es algo. Coger otro. El futuro queda atrás, retrasado por las tergiversaciones cerebrales. Mi relación con las baldosas es pésima. La piel se suavizó los mocos se remojaron. Un vocabulario del quinto grado posibilita el futuro. Escritura automática con palabras inexistentes. Ya se ha dicho. La lengua mía intenta encontrarte y cae a la mitad del callejón. Sin palabras. Me callo. La sequía se quedo décadas atrás. La madre perdida en los escombros. No te cuento ya.

You get quiet.  You are almost always alone.  You stop going out to the city.  Stop telling long, entertaining stories to make people laugh.  You move into yourself and out of the world.  You suddenly realize the language you used to speak is not the language you write now.  You suddenly realize what condensation gathers on the window on days when suddenly the temperature drops.  You cook beans in a pot made of clay, let them come to a boil and then watch them.  You do small things.  You write like never before because suddenly you have nothing else and it is obvious that there is nothing else.  You stop reading the Internet.  You disconnect from the Internet.  Your friends are worried about you.   You do nothing to allay their fears.  You stop returning phone calls in a regular, orderly fashion.  You harbor dreams of greatness and wonder how it would be achieved.  You masturbate at night and continue to enjoy the moment after orgasm more than the orgasm itself.  You write because your grandmother dies and suddenly that entire generation is gone.  You try to imagine fictional worlds and constantly end up regressing to your own.  You wonder about how your language has regressed in the last few years.  Your isolation is supposed to be productive.  You produce.  You write many words whose quality you doubt to the extreme.  You labor over words and syntax.  You strain to eek something shiny and bright out of old, old words.  Sometimes you are happy in your quietness and talk to yourself.  This is not being quiet, you scold yourself.  Alone, staring out the window you see the trees, the forest, the mountain in the distance.  You have suddenly arrived to the place you have always wanted to be.  The chance is yours.  

Worn out and spun around a pole. Knit into a corner of holey concrete. Arranged for sale. Time would be a savior of tulips and glass vases. Tomato sauce smothered on everything. Gone for a moment please.

Estás son las imágenes que no sé traducir a tu idioma.  Cuando mi dices que hablo bien me pongo a pensar en las obviedades que todavía se me escapan.  Igual y soy demasiado ingenuo.  Estas trampas que tienden me son extraños.  Imposibles de saber cuando se aproximan.  De repente, estoy atrapado y no me puedo escapar.  Son explicaciones que uno repite hasta el cansancio y que terminan confundiéndole a uno más que resolviéndole las dudas.  Toda explicación tiene hoyos.  Un colador de sueños.

Me puse esta camisa hoy porque me gustan las letras. Dice Metallica en letras grandes inclinadas, esas letras que son como relámpagos. Esas que ya conoces, verdad, con la gran M y la gran A que forman un tipo puente en medio. Espero que la camisa le guste a él también. Siempre se ve más punk que yo. Hoy también. Hoy hasta más, con sus jeans súper apretaditos, sus botas negras. Hoy me dio un panfleto que dice también en letras grandes, también letras que se ven como relámpagos, dice "Hagamos del Punk nuevamente una amenaza" y tiene un tipo vestido igualito tocando su guitarra con violencia. Me dio el panfleto hace tres horas. Vino a mi casa, me lo dio y se fue. Dijo que tenía que ir a la casa de su mamá unas horas, un compromiso pues. Me puse a leer el panfleto anarco-punk. La rebelión, la actitud anti-autoritaria, las nuevas palabras como anti-autoritaria. Decidí que a mí también me gustaría ser una amenaza. Ahora necesito botas negras y jeans más apretaditos se supone. Y pues hace rato, él regresó a la casa y salimos juntos. Vamos a la casa de una amiga. Esa amiga siempre nos da chance de pasar un rato a solas en su cuarto. Es súper buena onda la chava. Pero hoy, realmente no me importa si hacemos algo a no. Antes de subirme al Metro, paseamos por la Macroplaza. A cada mendigo que encuentre en su camino le da por lo menos diez pesos. Lo merecen, dice. Viven mal, dice. Hablamos de los ochenta, de lo que leí en el panfleto, de todo eso, y la plática estuvo chida. Quiero comprarme las botas primero. Lo he pensado, y, sabes qué, estoy cansada y cuando llegamos a la casa de la amiga, me voy a dormir un rato. Nunca dormimos mucho allá. Pero hoy estoy cansada.

(Foto de Abraham Palafox.)

I knew my day was headed downhill when I got the email. She had obviously grown up and was in the process of becoming famous and who can blame her. Before, when she wrote me, it made me want more from myself, challenged me to be better, to make me a better woman. One year, she had gone back to the country where her parents were born on a roots type of trip, one she did often, and she returned with stories about her grandmother, her aunts all the people who loved earthworms and forested mountainsides and growing small plants and weeding. They all seemed like good people, the people who she was from. They made her whole and when she brought the story back we talked together about wholeness, about the men we were living with, about the dreams we'd whispered to each other in high school. That year we had reconnected. She said my multicolored apartment was beautiful, she seemed to envy something about me carving out a space in our town. The slight tinge of envy in her voice made me feel better about my choices in life. It had been ten years since we met. We were those girls no one talked to or cared about, the ones who discovered their rebellion in black nail polish and Converse sneakers. In her email, she talked about London, riding the Tube, about her shock and delight at carousing with famous people and writers who would change my life if I had just ten minutes with. While she was doing that, I was surviving a shitty week; I got drunk more than was recommendable for my already damaged stomach, ended up in bed with a guy I'd sworn I'd never sleep with. Everything seemed to smell like mold all week no matter where I went to. All my sentences end with hanging prepositions. In the email, all her sentences ended perfectly, independent and subordinate clauses hung together like Christmas lights on the tree. Her life had become a Christmastime special, the kind of rags to riches story that warms hearts, and my life had become a series of regrets and mistakes, a long avenue of neon colored strip malls with crap stores selling discounted goods that look flashy and original from a distance, but on closer inspection reveal themselves to be fakes, knock-offs, bad industrial reproductions of something which had begun as a good design and ended up rotten. To be more specific, her email was a list of enviable encounters with famous people, really famous people like Nelson Mandela and Joan Didion and Spielberg. The email was actually a kind of response to a long, drunken tirade about letting go of dreams I had sent her a month before. She had never responded to it and I wondered why after so many weeks of not responding, she'd decided to respond to me at the moment she did. When she was in London, at the top of her game, when she had so much to report. I realized something at that moment. And I got up from my computer, walked across the curtained house, blinds drawn and roller shades pulled down to keep out the infernal summer heat, through the midafternoon shade to the refrigerator and popped open a beer. The window by the kitchen table was still open a little. I'd cracked it in the morning when the air outside wasn't so overwhelmingy hot. I closed the window, pulled the blind shut, and took long sips from my beer. I had no plans for that night, no idea of where I would want to go or who I would want to see. Today seemed so much better yesterday, when it was a tomorrow full of hope.

(Foto by Abraham Palafox.)

The jellyfish dead on the beach washing up to shore stranded on the coast was the first sign of homesickness. Also the refinery towers rusted storage tanks and rocky embankments. A weak blackened stream emerging from a natural canyon or well a ditch or some word that is placed between canyon and ditch. After turning back reencountered footprints rounded voluptuous marks smooth and disparate each one a unique impacting. Elicited a certain sensitivity a tenderness a softness of heart and watching the marks the question whose footprints are those and who has walked this way and imagined a body and the body was smooth and tender as well and a sense of loss permeated from shoulders into elbows and back down to ankles as if this body were submerged repeatedly in water like laundry in a washing tub gently by hands of habitual work. All around the spray of the sea sandy rocks coated by a yellowish orangish algae a wall built to protect the homes in the distance on both sides towers rise up and it seemed yet to be everything the word beautiful was invented to signify. But then again the dead jellyfish refinery towers rusted storage tanks potholed pavement on the way down dusty embankments plants suffocated by dust and the drainage stream I could not cross. Also algae and walls and industrial tourism maybe are not what beauty is. Whatever the case may be the space in this heart reserved for this day will not include what is beautiful. This heart stakes a claim to what was amiss. And all of the wrongness made one pine for home.

(Foto by Abraham Palafox.)

Hurts to understand the world is an unforgiving place. Lies are raw and lay on sidewalks moaning while allegations fly. Defend yourself.

Circumnavigate. A reason for flowers and colors. A rain bowl set out in front of the tortillería. And rambunctious drops careening from metal laminate roofs down bare plaster walls and puddling at the concrete base. Children arrived seeking a way to dry. Little ones had run the length of the town screaming shouting. Always unconscious to the fright of wetness. They entertained women stealing away their drying laundry from the uproaching torment. Created new patterns and explored mud untouched by human feet. These were explorers and their rhythms had been written generations before by their ancestors. Conquerors and conquerered all of us. We play each day anew. Placing pins on a neon map and carving lines on unbespoiled land.

Accent libido. Young appraised uncompleted.

La línea estatal. Un estado sublime a lado de uno decrépito. Y separado por el agua jabonosa y charcos de refrescos diluidos por el vinagre. Nos servían el café tibia y aunque estuviéramos jodidos no lo aceptábamos. De un lado amarilo y del otro también. Hace falta la plática entre los perros de allá y de acá. Siempre el miedo a caer sobre el hueco y no saber subir otra vez. El ruidoso tormento ensordeció las sirenas y ahora hasta el canto se ha agotado.

The hem was frayed by years of abuse. What had been presumed sturdy tore at the seams. We took our patterns for granted and by the end it was too late. I suppose we could have been friends if I had learned to buy presents for birthdays. Afterwards I left and the border guards detained me on a white plastic chair. The night before the chair had stood in for a stool as the guard had hung his son's piñata from the highest tree in the yard. An oak. His pants ripped at the crotch as he stepped down.

Traveling makes unforeseen impressions through sand. These living trails. This sage and lantana and sedum weren't leading out bodies to health. I dreamed of passageways leading up over the old passes through the sierras. Remember how that lady had those aluminum earring at half price and how the picture of the woman waiting for the company bus reminded you of your mother. It for me too. How walking made the feet sing. Moreso wail. We all participated in our precinct conventions this year no matter our affiliations, or at least the citizens amoung the collective. Then sunlight illuminated the plastic in ways branches could not explain. Cracked sidewalks below fragile wind-up nuns from overseas and an orange neon Filet-O-Fish. No commercialization is beneficial they said. Or was. And still we walked.

Lo que le da ganas a uno de salir a la calle. Lo que nos urge al final de cuentas. La cantidad de cosas que recordamos. Todo lo que se queda en los bolsillos después de la inundación. El temor a la lengua es el mismo que le anima a tocar la piel húmeda. Las esposas en la playa solas miran el puesto del sol. Vagan sus maridos buscando puertos más arriesgados. Lo que le saca a uno de sí mismo y nos une a todos.

Levitate pumps. Leviathan pampers. Leave and top and pee. Leaf ant a pound eyes. Left on a pantry is. Leavened pomp is.

A Slate of Clean

A part of the world that exists. Access points to a new field. Want the child to make sacrifice. An image of skills and criticism. Encouraging explorations. An invitation to start seeds. Bigger than the tours. Well fed and naptime. Soak every inch up. Focus in on him and up until noon. Happier and less frustrated.

We are all have all been wrong. We invent failing methods of language and expression. We trip and fall unmeaning. We rig traps in musty places where intruders would be should have been welcome.

This is not a poem. Doesn't move like a poem or breathe like one. Doesn't leave marks in the sand at sunset or even flow correctly. If anyone called it a poem or a made a reference to it as one, they would be wrong. No metric no rhythm no rhyme no commentary in verse nothing that would make anyone call it a poem. Doesn't even know clearly what are verses or syllabics or any of these permutations. Look a conclusion an argument and scarcely any awareness of language. Not reflexive or referential in that way of a poem. No rules are being broken or made. Not referencing a millenary tradition of poetic innovation or form. A total unawareness of what its origins or partners in crime could be if. Definitely not a poem. Words and then kind of sentences and perhaps a paragraph. But yet it is written. And read.

Specify your experiences and make details about all that is now faded and peeling. Hold the mercy of returning finches cardinals the power of early March fronts petals of rose and hibiscus scattered on concrete. Make space for fresh dandelion greens born of concrete cracks. Hollow out a nook for seeds and fragile new growth yellowing and blossoming in these early days. That dirt and moistness makes choices possible.

Their wealth bygone. Your reason forever. Their choices new. Your table wooden. My shoe unglued. Our future copper. Varnished and used. Your glee contagious. Our sadness too.

El pope del populacho. El popurrí se puso popular con los popís. Poured lines of powder. Raggedy edges unmade by boundaries and rules. Tú hiciste el muro. Lo construiste de concreto y los huesos de madres. Lo que es popular resulta nada fructífero.

Choice

Both are so delicate. We break easily or fade. Shred these paper tears for wont of a home. No one will accept the remnants. Search please. We beg you. And yet. I promise no gentleness abides the daily tempest.

Broken this dream of franchisement. Again through the hole into depths of unmastery. Head wracked with needles flies through notes rhythm red stews and squeezed lemons old fashioned ones. How about a complete sentence. Can you do a complete grant application. A squint of light on a radiant slanting sun about to set. A shine so fateful induces a headache. Everything gray paint and peeling unskinning itself from the craggy surface.

Your travel has lead to obvious conclusions known aforehand from reading extensively in leather couches adorned by I-Pod pillows. Fantasies of aggrandizement. Not very very. Neither as such. Obvious commentaries on citizenship exams dragons rats newness and out of control faith. My fish tastes of bean paste chili forgotten seeds salty nightmares and debilitated avenues.

Novato. Las jaquecas no provocan buena poesía. Vinieron y me avisaron. Yo lloré. No me puedo deshacer de tus directivas prescriptivas. Me gusta que el lenguaje se desborone. El pan se me desboronó. Las palabras cayeron en desuso. No te lo puedo explicar.

El saldo es. Los que perdieron siempre ganan. Me diste una idea salaz. Me querías corromper. Sal. Tueste. Y ya no veo el motivo de tantas mentiras.

Celoso el sexo. Selecciono el éxtasis. La celeste celibata. A break in language. A crook in this long asphalt dream. Translate my yearning for wood. Waves unexpected. Where bosom spacial. Wove espouses shells.

Rivers flow thick with promises. An exterior loaded down with expectations candied apples and sage. A traveling circus unable to convene its festivities. All the prisoners eat their lunch in the visiting room. Please don't touch the glass. Por favor que no toquen el vidrio. Your long dicks made for brokenness and fabled excess was a lie unable to free but a butterfly from a long rusted cage.

Laugh run tear a piece off and eat. Left right error. Never could follow direction. El hijo de puta que lo prometió nunca apareció. Laugh runt. Eran tiempos mejores los de antes. We were born too late. Digo demasiado temprano.

Unsun afternoon wind through cedar and broken window glass clanks unmercifully unfallen. Burnt red branches tiny tendrils of heat burnt growth demand a gaze. Mud tracks broken plastic bucket overflowing with aluminum afterlives. Swing merges with ditch run down full of slime a toy truck and putrid water. We play here. Wooden pathway is merging with swampland its stink a call for reparations. No breeze strong enough.

Rest

This month has been a party which continuing will should. Language which arrived intact se ha desbaratado. Me cuestiono en el camino. A ver que se da. Nothing is to be had. Or won. Dust envelops these dying bodies. Demonstrative machinations. Si me muero, que los colores salven el polvo del basurero.