Social commentaries

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.

When I stop to consider my calling, remark
the places a wayward temper impelled me
I’ ve found in light of where I wandered lost
the most appalling evils could have befallen;
but when I disregard the journey it’ s hard to
even fathom I endured so much affliction;
what’ s more, my days being spent, I feel I’ ve
seen my wariness go with them. I’ ll come to
my end, for I surrendered artless to someone
with the science to dispel and destroy me if
so inclined, else the know-how to want to;

On the volatile nights of a winter
nature corroborates with magnanimity
a Cuban is in training for amusement or amnesia,
so often and unfairly assumed as the same,
he brings candy to God, he cultivates the vernacular, he fights off
cirrhosis with fruit poached in syrup, he conducts business;
thus research has shown that The Cuban is resourceful.
In the weighty choreographies of a summer
nature authorizes already with suspicion
a Cuban meets the ocean with offerings and harpoons,
so often and unfairly assumed as the same,

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

for Larry Villanueva

Our big city is a city of big bombs and big bicycles, we hire grafters for their pretty art. To force a shoot inside a shoot, to grow an apple on a crab, to grow a plum upon a leprechaun. Dyspepsia is often grafted upon hysteria. To grow a boy inside a belly, cutting capers. Words, through grace, are grafted in our heart and the orange bears a greener fruit that blossoms as it swells. With imperfect grace from that perfect grace from wherever that perfect grace may remain.

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