on the familiar curve down
fray servando,
past comforting cubes of yellow
and red—
727, 781
799
—the car changes speeds and the weight of paper days,
two,
unfolds across my chest.
Your city is too big for my heart to hold.
Still my core unfurls,
unending paper ribbons,
unprepared for less than the impossible
Entirety
03.22.10
when that tunnel forms down the center of my tired eyes,
the fantastic miniatures are replaced by the painted advertisements
of calzada de tlalpan,
black letters on yellow.
gravity dissolves and the painted tunnel gives way
to gray blocks on the valley floor,
early morning haze—
barren hills, why do you break my heart?
why does a green and brown quilt,
rimmed by volcanoes and unfathomable small bright stacks
of human life,
churn me in ways that only the deepest parts
of a brain
should understand?
03.22.10
You fill a gap in me;
you swim where folly yearns to breathe.
i hold you in my cold eyes,
heart too still
To break
01.14.10
streets blend in my dizzy mind
silent black sidewalks,
pools of light where i bathed in smoke and hungry eyes,
let crude possibility crawl on my skin.
i drift in a gentle infinity; try to measure
the subtle separation of my own mind
from all outside
to gauge the hypocrisy of reality.
i fumble blindly, too lucidly in my vodka vacuum.
i am yours;
Your ashes burn my skin.
07.18.09
Scene in a nightclub:
The suffocating crowd readjusts and I am dancing next to four Brazilian girls, cousins, friends, or sisters, who align themselves in a tight semi-circle. Three have long, heavy hair that lies straight down their backs; one wears curls around her shoulders. Their round acne-scarred faces are carefully made up. They dance with a purpose. A common ideal flickers behind their eyes. I remember suddenly how it feels for tight sequined jeans and satin tops and Payless shoes to be enough, to come and dance and drink and go back to work, to meet someone perhaps and go back home to a cramped house smelling of lime and cilantro and jabón Foca and all the other people living there, to work and cook and have babies and get too fat for the sequined jeans but probably wear them all the same, to long for my country and to bow my head and to accept deep pain as my share of an inevitable destined path, to swallow or to lose all.
02.15.09
