June Bug

I awoke today and called out to you
your face in my mind
grinning wide
i left the house 
for the first time in a week
muggy and still damp
the smell of snakes
intrinsically oiled
and pungent
a warning 
becoming ever more warned
the onset of true hunger
and yet another summer shower
drove me into refuge
shaking like the last brown leaf
i scratched your name
on the bathroom wall
like lemons acid
finding each new cut
every microabrasion 
finding me
the blind acolyte grasping at 
beads or figurine or
the glittering ward of your name
walking out i spot the same massive crow
that’s been keeping tabs on me
urging a liver
full of vinegar to inhibit its
destined purity
i’ve been keeping tabs
after speaking to Gibson 
in a dream
that i am a spoiled child
of the Chemical Generation
the half-life of X
mocking prayer in the 
Acid Mother’s Temple
a humorless joke on the love children
and how that all ended
he referenced 
a million scraps of paper
spit out by a machine 
kept running eternally
heaven’s spyware
they all made movies about Vietnam
what will we make movies about?
How long hammering away until everything 
must use absurdist platitudes to absolve 
the myriad pain of toil?
‘Though Performing like the Psychology of Tribalism’
Am i only sitting at a card table hemmed in by 
poor surrealists?
There must’ve been rules at some point.
one asks ‘will i witness the apocalypse?’ 
and i roll my eyes
audibly.
The one affected orders me to get a job
in a factory that fabricates
gravel pebbles and astroturf
i could only imagine we’ll need those in the future
on distant planets
to manifest our humanity
to help us through it
ya see, that’s the thing about awaking in a dungeon 
you need a dagger or animal companion to
help you through it
this is my companion
this is my dagger.

-v.t.s.

Poetry for Convicts

I’ve begun it
my self control evaporated
along with the snail pace
of personal progress
i write love poems to convicts
until they all fall head over heels in their
catacomb mentalities
punching a pillow
that may as well’ve been concrete
while i was there with them 
i felt an unreal pull
to become it
to melt into a collective consciousnesses of 
brutality and lovely fear
until my letters began to show up
on biceps
tattooed onto enemies
stab my joke of love
into the brawn
a cattle brand of displaced romantic emotion
                 
                 ………

It’s been like this ever since you disappeared
i heard you in the bistro
you were practically speaking into my skull
with your in-eloquent voice 
referencing a beach town in the gulf, which isn’t real
you’ve floated into another plane
the secret door activated leads towards
the ungodly scene 
awash with memories not my own
and the stink of nostalgia hanging 
some fog over a marsh
the particular atmosphere that mummified all deaths
no different from the unearthing of Guadalajara’s dusty graves
and their mummias
followed by the pang of Catholic fear that any divergent act sounds
them looking on in ornamental cope full of 
rats or feathers or hair
whichever it is they’re hiding
always questioning
when the sign for omega will stop showing up
scrawled at unreachable heights 
is this world but a portal of reference? 
basic beauty debased, 
someone else’s lovely evening?
                   …………..
A love letter to a prisoner 
describing my latest hairstyle
a desire to keep the dark partisans
hopeful and alive 
to not allow law’s tramp to
fall beyond recognition. 
I must encourage the man who just discovered whiskey
to drink enough to induce sickness
and the revelation that follows
I must inspire the robotic arm that just thought
to make a thumbs down 
ignoring its inverse
Arise Criminals!
I’m hammering out my little bird heart for you
i’ll sleep like the afternoon cat in a bed of snakes
i’ll leap into a bottomless pit
i’ll smash the walls and let them all run free
and i will find you
in the mind of one of my admirers 
hidden in a passage ever shrinking
you’ll be blindly tracing it all out in the dirt
explaining why it was
i wrote love letters to prisoners. 

-v.t.s.

 

14 poems for love

Jodi Barnes made me do it

I love myself
and the repetitive
number machine 
hellish super computer
set me free

My love shines
before dawn 
as I’m sleepily stuttering 
I’ll make spaghetti
or gulag

I would rip-off
Leonard Cohen
he would find and kill me
signed, love

Out by the bus station
all night
the moon relinquished
your greedy, little heart

Love, 
japanese demon moto
a mountain of zippys
severed hand
bisected by a friend

I wanted to write
a poem of crossword answers 
unintelligible
a result of love

love
like most four letter words
can be placed in a magnitude
of significance

The Universality
of a Oneness of Goop
is held together
by sticky, benign love

I left 
in the summer time
because love
is freedom
and freedom is meteoric

pull all the petals 
from the flower
wipe the species
infinitesimal sound
of romance

self-hate 
is a form of love 
enacted 
through fear
vitriol
a necessary expression

morning’s rays
reach my swollen form
on the tiled kitchen floor,
I loved you

I’m incapable 
of writing love poems
that aren’t about
science fiction
or drug addicts

-v.t.s.

Charlìe (part 1 of 3)

ANCESTRY

Speaking excitedly
your language
is one that does not exist
and is misconstrued
by your countrymen

You must have
strained and crouched
and fallen in the 
beds of countless trucks.
All Hail The Polleros!
and the day I 
translated
I cringed. 

You must have 
seen and smelled
and touched
the earthen floor
with dirt shapes
a thousand times over.

Then the boiling world 
was beautiful, bounteous and 
the sweltering world
was minuscule.

The men at the shore
hauling in
billions of horrified shrimp
and you look on
and raise the question
“How’s the water?”
“It’s warm, little boy.”
so you swim out
until your arms betray you
and the men pretend
to capture you
in their massive nets 
once you return to shore.

Where were destroyed
or washed away
the reeds.
They show to you
all their objects 
and then did they tell you
what to call them?
Did they try to pull
that bastard tongue
out of your head?

You were so less
as a youth, unwizened
the unwieldy
unmistakably
suffered through confusion,
groaning that you are
still no more yourself.

Showing me a picture
of a young girl
(hija)
and showing me a picture
of two boys kissing
(maribosas)
and I don’t know 
what to say to you.

Rolling into New York
somehow
while we must’ve seemed
ridiculous with wealth
numerous shops and cars
all the neighborhoods
knowing you couldn’t stay long,
and there never was hardly
anything here for you.

Then there was the 
American South
you felt the 
nostalgic warmth
electric, magnetic
and saw lush
farms and farm workers
The every annunciation of
“we go down to our home”
or even
“place of the Misty Sky”
Tamoanchan
knowing you could not erase
-your mother is dead.
-your father is dead.

When I met your roommate
who looked like Castro 
hiding out as a gaucho
and laughing at my
positive colloquialisms
and said he had tried heroin
in Chicago, 1978.
Having seen more of this nation
than I ever will
and he still wonders
‘ where is my family?
where are my children?
why am I here?’

The passage in the book
nearly seared my retinas
claiming the societal outcasts
and the immigrants
are inextricably tied.
Immediate companions,
I wept in the folding chair
outside her office.

When asked your age 
you paused and smiled
“A century
(un siglo)”
I wouldn’t keep track
if I were you.

The Chihuahuan Desert is on fire
and you pin a 
ribbon of misery
in recognition 
to your staff t-shirt
for las muertas 
for the end of the world
and the sharpened teeth
glimmer by the moon
by the maquiladora
that is Mecca.
While the rest of the crew
pokes fun at your
faggot ribbon.

You and an El Salvadorean
go out for mezcal
and carrot juice
and you fear him
fear his silence
his unseen implications
this visage tattooed
with scars from torture
as a political prisoner
politics he would’ve been
otherwise unaffiliated with,
yet there is a bond there
through proximity
in tongues
and sheer 
distances traveled.

The agave heart cooked
tenderly pace the turkey breast
into the slow mashing process
it’s flavor burns
with the fervor of a home
the El Salvadorean grins
and repeats a saying not his own
“para todo mal,
mezcal,
y para todo bien también.”
Charlìe grins as
the worm
that promised god harvest
in 1941
pouring a stream onto
the floor for
the fertility of this world.