Free Verse

At once this dragnet of cousins
Whips its way into your presence saying
None of them among us. They are
Oracles on the court of midnight,
The tight filigree of a mind or your
Splashing around in, your pandemonium
Of copper graffiti inexpertly put up.
They make weapons of furled hands.
“We will walk, but our bones will carry
Ribbons of lead, or we will, like
Acrobats mill-headed in 3s (3 blades,
3 hips, 3 tongues), answer to what comes
Before, what comes before?” Eleousa,
Master of Dark Eyelids, eye opening

grown to give this gun
to you that sings
around another metal grip
inside the stall that goes
against the marker that has cuts
and calculates their known
deception, something ran
instead around the parked
encircles disks. wagon, tent
was all that heard, no mouths
were twice together found
or borrowed in the ceiling of
another torso promising this
twice together head, this push
through veins that gives your
death another word, another
his, another whipping rain
with any arm and any end

¿ are you
on the other side
waiting
for alarms
in a desert
of sleepless
evaporations?

¿ are you
beside yourself
in the aisles
that distance
makes shorter

than light waves
in the daylight
that pounds
a lead slab
in the soup
that the winter
dissolves?

i make signs everywhere, with sticks, stones and leaves
for those in the clouds from below the line to arrive

i don’ t have a language to speak to you with, my tongues are all fish

i know that a one is a circle, and that nothing is round,
except every corner i saw by the hearts
lined up on the spine

i know that the winter will finally be here again, and that the summer
will die and be born with its ice

Vulnerable therein & perfectly
relinquished by statis,

object always of my
natal, crepuscular desire,

into the translucent specter,
body’ s blue fossil

of ice, never autochthonous,
still embarked upon

the imperative passage to get
there, to secure a geography

that will beg description,
narrative map, adopted

tentatively; if only to write
the ritual book of what was possible,

but never bound to occur.

“All accounts of the past are made up of possibilities.”
— Dionisio Martinez

for Larry Villanueva

I swallow a pill but there is no cure
A city map won’ t get me where I want to go

Scaling the scaffold,
mindless of the mall,
unaware of driveways
where housewives dodge the wrecking ball,
I crawl outside these vacant blues

and into the contours of your eyes

In which everything goes backwards
in time and motion
Palm trees shrink back into the ground
Mangos become seeds
and reappear in the eyes of Indian
women
The years go back
cement becomes wood
Panama hats are seen upon skeletons
walking the plazas
Of once again wooden benches
The past starts to happen again
I see Columbus’ s three boats
going backwards on the sea
Getting smaller
Crossing the Atlantic back to the

you are falling
sun shine miracle
your lips are wet
rain
to our hearts
floods in every opening

on the stoop your skirt rises
fingers go up your legs

you are falling in the streets

the hallways of east harlem
the dark hallways of east harlem
the dark hallways with mattresses
of east harlem
you are falling