alas not weak in each tasty living
breath. we live where time is no
longer complained, a place where
dreams sluggishly still make their
way into the light, the deeply hidden
spring that has held thousands of tears
and bathes us now with the scent of
heaven that was always near—this
we say delivers us!
The Storm
in our twenty-first century
the devastation of a storm
threatening to leave more
dead than anyone has the
strength to bury in soggy
ground exposes stars and
stripes sinking into a vast
sea. our flag placed on the
distant moon the hurt and
dying nightly see is like a
desert mirage for Spanish
speaking citizens who do not
count for the president as other
than spics! the sweet chariots
of God cannot even rescue the
condemned who live each day
afraid since the foul mouthed
head of a decaying democratic
State gives no crying damn for
flag or them!
The Sting
the history toward which
the country slides will be
memorized in the future
with indecorous words,
a bitter taste on tongues,
the sound of heaped up
wailing, and the Rose
Garden haunted by all
the anonymous dead in
the deserts, mountains,
cities, and islands in the
middle of vast seas. the
future made last week by
the president’s tweets spread
ignorance across the land,
conceited tales ringed with
the scum of nothing good
done, and citizens swayed
by rabbit punching lies to
live quietly in these times.
the history the future will
bitterly speak, the stories
from the public squares, the
marches on town streets, the
abominable citizens who paraded
hate covered with white sheets,
the elected idiots who came to
their defense, will ask of every
resident whose precious life was
dressed with utter fright what
comes next?
The Garden
in my childhood on the
streets, I saw in the ripe
hour of each day things
spoken about truth in the
gloomy basement of the
church that were clearly
not true. I passed through
many sanctuaries, where
the good folks wasted dreams,
denied the long lines of sorrow
claiming their kids and waited
for the coming hour to lower
beloved innocence with heaps
of rotting flowers beneath the
earth. in loud hollow tones, I
heard voices by men trained to
think morally exhorting broken
hearts on the block to wait for
coming heaven and the aromatic
blossoming of the stony road. after
all these years, the wailing has not
stopped, the good news yet only
sweeps away the dust, priests are
glad in useless prayer, academics
have their cottage industry studying
our streets and Spanish eyes keep
searching for the promised land
confessing it’s just too damn far
from here.
The Painter
woke up to hop the subway
downtown to get lost in an
art museum to look at oils
that imagined the unfinished
work of God, stroll the rooms
with creaky floors the grey world
doesn’t visit, stare at the Picasso
using colors and lines to trick my
eyes, until a word jumped up to
say something about the beginning
of things. I wanted to find somebody
to tell of an old woman on the block
living on the ground floor of Lefty’s
building who painted at night. She
must have had a special set of eyes
to see things in the dark, to have the
night come to her like water rushing
down a steep hill, then capture on a
canvas details thrown her way by
whispered ghostly streets. I looked
for the associate curator of the cubist
wing, while repeating a few lines in my
head about having him come down to
the barrio to have a look at the paintings
this Abuela boxed and placed in a room
with a window facing the Westchester
Avenue. I found him talking casually
about Goya, Picasso, Orozco, Caravaggio,
and Manet in a near empty room, a small
voice in me said what the hell you can’t lose
anything inviting