Tijuana Book of the Dead Read online

Can you color my pale leaves

  Burn them pulsing red

  Before they fall? Can you lick

  This winter back

  And rain

  Rain

  Rain your watersongs

  Over my lips

  My hands

  Can you rain

  Inside my chest?

  Irrigation Canal Codex

  Y los muchachos cling

  To the cantina’s jukebox heart, sing:

  We never go nowhere we never see nothing

  But work: these fingers bleed every daylong day,

  Aching from la joda of the harvest—

  Y la muerte, esa puta que nos chifla

  From the bus station balcony, from I-10,

  From Imperial Ave. truck lot behind the power station,

  From waterbreak delirium, from short-hoe

  Genuflections down pistolbarrel fields—

  And the canals green,

  Pumping life into those chiles, los tomates, once

  A year some poor pendejo can’t take the grease—

  Heat drudge, the life of a burro, the lonesome nights

  Of sweat and harsh sheets and drinks

  Tattered lips pulling tequila

  Till el vato’s so alucinado he thinks

  He can run free, thinks

  The trucks with spotlights are motherships, thinks

  He sees Villa shooting cars on I-25, hears Tlaloc, god

  Of storms, calling, water to water,

  Rain to rain, mud to mud—feed me your tears—I

  Thirst—I will feed your daughters, I will

  Sweeten the fields, I will ease your heat—and

  He runs

  He runs

  Se larga el guey

  Down the alley, out

  Dirt road, cuts

  Under freeway, jumps

  Barbwire

  Where that homey last year drove his troca

  Into the ditch

  He’s so pedo he can’t see

  If it’s stars or distant windows, he

  Can’t tell if it’s roadside crosses where some bus

  Drove into a delivery truck

  Or if it’s a fence all white and crooked

  Or a boneyard

  Where his grandfathers fell apart

  Beneath him, he runs—

  • • •

  Through Carrizo reeds, midnight sunburn,

  Cane and chapulines dry as bones,

  Rattling like deer hooves, like Calaveras on

  The Day of the Dead, like Yaqui rattles,

  Like old Death snapping her fingers and then amazing

  Green

  Green, cold green of the canal: sun-scummed

  But icy, fresh and still steaming through back-crack

  Cabbage fields, from sunrise to el poniente,

  Going going green endlessly going

  Verde que the quiero verde going

  He dips his head to drink

  And it grips him: he slips: he’s a watersnake, slick:

  Drinks his way to the bed of the acequia

  And spreads his dust there: he is become an offering

  To the raingod and it is good: he breathes

  The green into his lungs until his heart grows cool:

  And he goes—

  He flows west: frogs ping off his back: dragonflies

  Part before him: tortugas worry his shirt tails:

  He flies mouth-down, arms wide as cranes’ wings

  Touching the rusted rims as he sails: miles

  Slide along his callused fingers—across the land he goes, no one

  Watching: he goes through the harvest: corn

  Combs his hair: nights he goes, days, no patrols

  Hunt him now: his lips never stop

  Kissing his shadow.

  And he touches earth

  400 miles away, gone somewhere now

  South of Calexico—almost home—

  Nothing in his pockets—

  Small fish

  In his eyes

  Like coins.

  Help Me

  For Sherman

  100 bad jobs

  before one poem published.

  Another lunch break, another

  greasy paper bag with another

  bologna and cheese sandwich.

  Invisible to women,

  not enough money in my pocket

  to get robbed.

  Public toilet

  on an otherwise

  heartless California day.

  An empty wheelchair

  in the middle of the room.

  • • •

  From a stall,

  a voice:

  “Hey guy?”

  He was twisted on the seat,

  pants around his ankles

  in a cloud of stink.

  “Help me? I’m late. Been in here for a while.”

  “Sure,” I said. “How?” I said.

  “I can’t get my pants up.”

  “That’s—” I said. “OK—

  How?”

  I bent to him and pulled up

  his underpants, pulled up

  his corduroys,

  pulled up

  his zipper, did the button

  on his pants. Even

  affixed his belt.

  He leaned on my shoulder

  skinny as a kite.

  • • •

  “At least you didn’t

  have to wipe me, guy.”

  We waltzed somehow

  to his chair and I set him

  in it.

  “Whoo,” he said.

  “Whoo,” I said.

  “Sorry.”

  “No, man, no—” then, he cried:

  “My lunch!”

  I went back in the stall: his lunch

  in a greasy paper bag just like mine.

  “Mom made it,” he said. “Can’t forget it.”

  I grabbed it.

  Mom had put a banana in there.

  I felt his entire life in my hand—

  his morning, his

  birthday, his Christmas, his bedtime.

  “Man,” he said. “Have a good day, and thank you.”

  • • •

  I broke out into the sun,

  walking, walking, squinting—

  too much sunlight out there—

  and went back to work

  forever.

  Walking Backward in the Dark

  So, the jury says, once upon a time you fed the poor.

  Guilty.

  You couldn’t see the ground for the wreckage.

  If the women had dysentery behind their sheds

  the earth turned green and red and yellow

  and you couldn’t tell what was food and

  what was shit and all your Jim Morrison songs

  were without avail. No prayer in your head

  took the smell. The only relief was the smoke.

  Tijuana’s dead dogs, flat cats, starvation cows,

  and highway horsekills split open

  by retired Illinois Macks hauling loads of U.S. chairs

  were drenched in a rain of diesel, fired

  up with torches: their ribs built smoking cages

  to catch your vision, charred hearts

  sacrificed to carrion crows.

  You couldn’t see home on burning days,

  the veils of flesh-fired fog cut the sky in half.

  You took them clothes on their flaming hills,

  took them water in white jugs, took

  frozen doughnuts and cans of donated corn.

  You went in the name of whatever God you’d cobbled

  together from your nightmares and your hope.

  Head lice fell

  by the thousands.

  This was the dream.

  Late from Mexico you’d rise

  to the neon lightning of America, you’d rise

  stinking of dogs and filthy women’s armpits, rise

&n
bsp; covered in the sweat of men who kill themselves

  mining for garbage in coats made of plastic bags.

  Bloodmud was caked on your running shoes.

  Too tired to run. Undone by days and days

  talking to people

  with no teeth.

  Home, your sweet rock-and-roll boys, so pretty

  with their Bowie hair and their painted girlfriends,

  All your best friends so dangerous with their Marlboros,

  doing their all-night hang at the doughnut shop

  you peeled a sheet of skin off the back

  of a child boiled by overturned cooking pots

  of lard

  after their gigs at strip bars and bowling alleys.

  Coffee and bear claws.

  What were you supposed to tell them?

  That Elvis Costello was cooler than Joe Jackson?

  That you knew where the immigrants were born?

  A Gibson SG smokes a Les Paul any day, man,

  but a Les Paul is ten times better

  than a Strat if you’re even thinking about

  “Dazed and Confused”?

  People eating run-over alley dogs.

  Ian Dury and the Blockheads buttons

  she tried to abort her own fetus with a wire

  on black leather jackets.

  You didn’t even try to sleep.

  It was too quiet.

  3:00 a.m.

  Television in those days signed off—showed bleached tape

  of American flags, test patterns—

  that Indian chief in the middle looking lost

  like you. You had meant to learn to dance.

  You, Emperor of Maggots.

  • • •

  That night you knew.

  that night it hit you

  you were walking

  invisible

  the abandoned miles of bedtime

  Clairemont Drive: duplexes looking small as a fossil

  John Lennon shot in the head.

  You’d been holding down a crying girl

  as a doctor scrubbed scabs off her face

  as blood lipsticked her mouth before you found out.

  Walking. Clocking.

  Quarter mile.

  Half mile.

  Mile.

  Ahead, almost black against the greater black,

  that man, facing you,

  moving away.

  You squinted, sped up: he backed away.

  You had to catch up to him—it was all in that

  crazy son of a bitch hurrying backward into midnight:

  it was all there, in him, and when you got close,

  started to say something, he spit at you,

  backed away running.

  • • •

  You

  Stopped.

  No moon. No stars. Maybe a Camaro

  with glasspacks raced a Boss 302 Mustang

  to the red light.

  You had a notebook in your back pocket.

  It was too dark to write

  what you needed to say,

  The Coward’s Prayer:

  I have to get away from here.

  Roadmaster ’56

  For Chicano Soul

  Tio Chente rolled out

  Low and slow

  In gabardine, fedora

  High-belt trousers

  And calcos

  The color of his face

  Color of his fenders

  And his doors, roof

  Yellow as his eyes

  No smiles

  Ever, loco, smiles

  Blew the Aztec vibe

  V8 high priest

  Never gone over 50

  Pinches miles

  An hour. Brodie

  • • •

  Knob on the wheel

  See-thru orange

  In case he needed to

  Spin out the Buick

  But tio Chente never

  Turned back

  Not once

  Cruising from TJ

  To Korea smoking

  Dominos unfiltered

  Old vato only

  Wanted to be buried

  In his ranfla

  His stone saying:

  Roadmaster.

  Poema

  Ya fue escrito

  Que moriré

  Mi vida pasará

  Como venadito

  Por estas montañas

  Tan ajenas

  Pero antes

  De dejarte

  Quiero escribirte

  Versos pequeños

  Poemas

  En la nieve

  Que te dirán adios

  Cuando salga el sol

  Tecolote Canyon

  and I wasn’t the only one who wrote poems—lowriders and

  cops, gang bangers gas station attendants—everybody in every

  alley that year that place wrote poems / I was

  riding in a midnight car w/ Big T: I loved his prison tattoos:

  loved the bars clanged

  over his mouth eyes mind days: they seemed so romantic: clang:

  clang: must have

  rusted his nights all night: clang: slam: lock: down:::loved the

  way he cried when he

  read his poems: loved his cell block muscles: man, those are

  some big fucken muscles:

  aint nothing to do for ten years but pull-ups, jack, what you

  think: he made me feel like

  I was bad, superbad like poetry itself was bad-ass / Big T, come

  out somehow from—he

  didn’t call it anything romantic, The House or The Stony

  Lonesome, called it

  prison.

  • • •

  can you dig that, sprung free by poetry itself—rode verse into

  daylight: paroled by odes.

  the warden puzzling out T’s indio haiku, seeing evidence of

  rehabilitation therein, good

  behavior after six or so years of shit behavior now walking the

  Basho path the Crazy

  Horse road, according to section X of document XX, item XXX,

  locks creaked open /

  and we were headed home, my Bro and me, after some reading,

  community solidarity—Chicanos, Marxist ballet folklorico

  warrior women, professors, cookies and watery

  punch—better for T if the cerveza stayed in its coolers: down

  Tecolote Canyon, deep

  behind white houses civilians sleeping where coyote preaches,

  owls slip on their feather

  gloves, steal night: I was so down w/ my homeboy, I started

  picking at his locks / digging

  a little escape hatch in his soul so I could peek into that great

  cell block of poems:

  • • •

  poetry

  heart:

  so T- man, tell me—vato—were you really in for life?

  oh yes.

  well what happened exactly?

  exactly?

  I killed a man.

  what did you think

  happened?

  wait, you killed a man?

  I shot him

  in the head.

  the canyon was curtained in coast fog—not another car on that

  road, and I said: but

  what

  what

  I mean

  what—

  • • •

  and he said:

  what does it feel like

  to kill a human being?

  is that what you need to know?

  are you just curious, carnal,

  or are you writing a poem?

  or are you planning

  to take out some mother

  fucker? because I’ll tell you

  if you really need to know—have I

  ever lied to you?—yeah

  I’ll tell you

  all about it.

  no, no bro, that’s o
kay

  I didn’t mean to pry—you don’t

  have to tell me.

  I know I don’t

  have to do shit,

  • • •

  but you asked

  and I’m

  going to tell you.

  you know how it feels to kill

  a man?

  it feels good.

  he kneels

  and begs

  for his life,

  and you hold

  the gun

  to his head

  and you think

  of all the blows

  and all the pain

  and all the whippings

  and all the hunger

  • • •

  and you put

  two

  rounds

  right

  in his skull

  and watch

  him

  die.