Out of the Mexican blue
Huddled beachless against
The Houston boxcar night
Begging for breath
Hope a dwindling dim
Names already lost
Against the standing dead
Elsewhere a coyote counts his take
Baying at a cloven moon
Bracero
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Tag Archives: reality
How it was
Maybe you counted on my sense of duty
To fill in your dreams
Or thought that in the end
All things would come around
To what you found obvious
To me, it was a shabby storefront
Cheap gilding framed the doorways
Loudspeakers blared assumptions
Crackling, as if through faulty wiring,
Or being consumed by fire
Sooner or later, I thought,
Collapse will come
My choices: cower, embrace the rubble,
Or leap free
Aldo
Aldo was a character in a series of commercials for cheap Italian wine some years ago. A character who needed development, I thought.
Aldo, not a slave to fashion,
Walks in, enslaving fashion
In a prison of gestures,
In a sly looking-glass wink,
As if none of it matters
Except that it does.
As if the curious drape
Of his gaze did not encase
His inner essence
Like a gilded cage
Aldo, little Aldo
Peers through filigreed wiles,
Unaware of the stifling air
Within.
Frank leans back
Frank leans back in the
Too small chair
Big stomach raised to heaven
Arms in limbo, gravity’s slaves
Like, truth to tell,
So is the whole of him.
All his imagining,
All his vast interior splendor
Lies imprisoned within
Severed eternally by
The cruel barrier of reality
From all of heaven and earth
In defence of heterogeny
Why doubt purity?
As if anything beyond a quark
Is in and of itself alone
As if essence were not a judgment
As if some notion, come to rest in a brain
Came bolting from divine dispatch
As if a single idea
Can express the contradictions
Of matter and spirit
Purists fling darts
From the comfort of the bubble,
Close ranks against orthodoctaroons
Remove splinters with exquisite surgery
All the while resembling utterly
The objects of their disdain
The truth is
The sum of our differences vanishes
Beside the sum of our sameness.
exiles child 