Driving To The Year Of The Dog

Got My Dog,How About You?

Ferris Bueller's Day Off

If Baghdad ain't safe
for Farris,Paris or Emmylou Harris
what makes you think it's safe for Iraqis?

Only George Harrison would not have to worry
about the bombs,only the Bushes
don't have to worry about their daugthers' tushes.

If Baghdad ain't safe
for Farris,Paris or Emmylou Harris
what makes you think it's safe for GI Joe?

FBI,CIA,NSA,no one has a clue
that a high school kid
is on Ferris Bueller's day off in Tikrit.

Let's hope the terrorists don't find out
what we're really about
no where near as bright as Gump's retarded brother.

The Other Cheek

As soon as war breaks out
I turn the other cheek,
I turn the other fifty cheeks.

I’m borrowing them
from the young men
and young women who will die

fighting these wars that break out
so that fat, rich old men
can make a profit.

As soon as war breaks out
I turn the other hundred cheeks
I borrow them from the soldiers

who must pay with their lives
and from the wounded, disfigured,
paralized, the living vegetables

who must pay the price
of the rich man’s vice
as soon as war breaks out.

Identity Theft

I’m not going to smile tonight
she told him
and there was nobody named Tim.

I’m not going to go
her eyes flashed arrows
no Lipan Apaches killed Lipan Apaches.

I’m upstairs now
trying on the wedding dress
ten earthquakes shook La Brea.

I’m not going to smile tonight
she looked in the mirror
as many times as campesinos slept.

I’m not trying to twist at all
as she stood tall
and Pablo was ignorant of Paul.

Henry’s Automotive Elegy for Illegal Alien
Ignacio Sanchez Mejias’ Pick-up Truck (La Cucaracha)

At five in the afternoon,
rush hour, the pick-up truck died
in the middle of the road,

Ignacio pushed with all his heart
and with the help of good Samaritans
at five in the afternoon.

It was a cold and windy day,
the clouds were made of ice,
there were no dots on the rearview mirror dice.

It was a dead battery,
it’ll have to be replaced
at five in the afternoon,

these goddamn cucarachas
always leave you walking
at five in the afternoon.

Little Henry Henryville At Twelve

When you are twelve and your mother dies
and you can not find God in the sky
because tears are pouring out of your eyes,

you feel like a monkey, you feel like a donkey
as you run through the fields
he-hawing and kicking.

You howl like Allen the wolf,
your mane like Jimi and Cal,
you lie down and bleat like a lamb,

you wait for the buzzards to buzz,
you’re not the little boy you was,
you ride in Emily Dickinson’s bus.

When you are twelve and your mother dies
you can not, you just can not
think that the sun will ever be hot.

I cried myself to sleep
for week after week after week
and called God a creep.

Guest Poet Rebecca Flores



Withholding Evidence

Like a probing jealous lover,
x-rays drill through my pelvis.

I hold my breath,
withholding pictures
of you taking root in me,
you and me in every conceivable way.

In a second it finds me innocent,
shows me smug evidence,
black-and-white absolute:
nothing but held-together bones,
not even touching in spaces
that are a hollow cry.

I smile a quiet victory,
knowing it isn’t always so.


copyright@2005 by rebecca flores

Guest Poet Rebecca Flores



Chatting About The Storm

In the driveway my neighbor and I chat
about our week’s business---
insurance claims and the recent storm
that broke over our roofs
in twisting gushes of rain,
left us without power for days.

“They started Craig’s roof early,”
she says, and I reply in phrases of concern
as my glance races across the street
where roofers hammer a late answer to the storm.
“I mailed an estimate yesterday.
They’ll cancel us after this,” she laughs.

My glance lingers on a young worker
wearing a t-shirt with M-E-L-I-S-S-A across the chest.
He walks down the slope to the ladder,
his hands and feet offering choices to the ground,
where he peels his t-shirt off,
catching our conversation.

We wave and his nod clings to the day,
spelling my new name, Melissa,
and I answer the doorbell a hundred times,
speeding a hundred glasses of ice water,
chatting about the storm
that left us without power for days.


copyright@2005 by rebecca flores

Guest Poet Rebecca Flores


Healing

On his return from a hunting trip,
my father brought back our dog
in a bloodied cardboard box.

No one said a word;
Tigre’s eyes and the
awful gash in his side told the story.

We held him down
as my father took a strand of catgut
and a needle from a bottle filled with alcohol.

When only a seam showed,
we followed my father in the house;
there was nothing else to do.

Our dog was already healing;
all he had to do
was lie still and let it hurt.


copyright@2005 by rebecca flores

Guest Poet Rebecca Flores


Flesh And Blood

1

Dear Mother,
the day before the baby was born,

I dreamed I was as pure as Eve,
lying in a bower of white roses,
under the reaching sun of the Garden

when the baby spurted out cleanly
between my legs
without a cry.

I thought you’d understand
if I told you that when I awoke,
I’d never been so afraid.

2

I spend hours at work
processing words into columns of print
used to build pages of news

while you piece hollow lengths of pipe
into scaffolds for boilermakers climbing
storage tanks at the refinery.

And as tomorrow’s pages are laid out,
and the night shift dismantles your work,
we come home

with only our blood to warm us.

3

Even though I was a girl
father expected me to be brave

as he held down
a soft cabrito and slit its throat.

Its eyes rolled in pools of white;
its cries lagged in the quickness of blood.

“It’s just blood,” my father would say.
“It didn’t keep him alive,

and though it’ll feed us,
it won’t keep us alive either.”

4

A bull can be chuted
into a bullfighting arena
and waste no time
figuring what it’s all about.

Let the cocky matador walk off,
spicing his steps with art,
he’ll stake his territory and stay,
pawing the sand.

Let the crowd see visions of truth
in this blazing heat,
he’ll hold the world
between his horns till then.

Let the blood foam on his back;
it’s only blood.
If it brings him to his knees,
he’ll spit at the thought
of shade and a quiet pasture.

copyright@2005 by rebecca flores

This Week's Guest Poet Is Rebecca Flores




Workers In The Watermelon Fields

Cicadas sing in the watermelon fields,
clear wings like prisms in the sun,
till sane, green furrows ramble in the heat,
pinch the land like a wailing accordion.

Field workers weave slow work, stooping,
cutting, hauling rows of watermelons,
watermelons, soft inside like a belly
you could stick a knife into.


Cicadas sing in the watermelon fields
and ringlets of heat dance crazy,
like gasoline fumes from a handkerchief
you sniff to get high before a dance.

The sun above is a woman,
a hot bitch under your skin,
and if you’re a man,
you work like hell beneath her,
worship her in a sweat,
slow work to the rhythm of cicadas,
in a day so long, the only sense.


copyright@2005 rebecca flores

Homage To The Chicana Poet Rebecca Flores

She is three years old,
she is sixteen years old,
she is twenty-three years old,

she is sixty years old,
she is Sappho,
Christina Rosetti,

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson,
H.D., Gertrude Stein, Anne Bradstreet,
Dorothy Parker, Elizabeth Bishop,

Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath,
Vangie Vigil, Lorna Dee Cervantes,
Carmen Tafolla, SHE, IS, REBECCA FLORES, POET.

Chris Pirillo as Jerry Lewis

Poetic Downfall

Someone asked
Mr. Bones
how he

creates his poetry,
“Well, in
my mind

I feel
like a rock guitarist
feels

when he’s
playing lead guitar,
his eyes closed,

his mind
and fingers
creating

the next
guitar lick,
until the song

becomes a classic.
Add a few words
and you’re done,

except for
that part
that makes

a bunch
of words
into a poem.”

Mr. Bones
strutted away arrogantly
before he slipped and fell.

That’s why
the French
love Mr. Bones so much!

Francis The Talking Mule Plays The Part Of Henry’s Burro

Looking into his burro’s eyes, Henry he-haws
beneath the insouciance of burro flesh
concealed, hints of being a steed,

coldest of winds have blown the bristle,
stirring million-year-old memory of seaweed.
The field’s slow poison tolerating poison

has found her blood, dry desert-like years
belong to her foul, lingering emptiness
like Dubya’s hilarious war---

the legs fed on hate.
She shares the agony
of the young mules who die

for no good reason he-haw, he-haw.
I have no burro, Henry flicks his remaining ear
and as he turns and leaves you see his rear.

Gustav Schwarzenegger

Like Father Like Son
Nein Clemency!

Henry’s Tourette Syndrome Love Poem For Reggie

“Come on, lady, I’ve seen continents drift faster than that!”
Becker to an old lady taking her time entering Reggie’s Diner

Love poem for Reggie composed with lines
from Stephen Hawking’s theories,
actually, it’s lines that Wallace Stevens

never used though they would’ve improved his poetry.
Tourette syndrome attack: eff you,
eff you, you effing bitch…!”

Don’t worry, it’s still a love poem,
but, maybe it was written by Rod McKuen
on Stanyan Street,

maybe it’s a love poem
written by a soldier to his girlfriend---
the letter arrives a week after he’s killed in combat.

The Political Poetry of Jenny McCarthy

Jenny’s wearing dead foliage
barely concealing her breasts
her pubic hair

and no foliage on the backside
allowing a nice view
of the crack of her ass.

The sun’s bouncing off her blonde hair
looks like she shaved her legs
this morning,

she’s protesting the war in Iraq,
she’s had enough of the government’s lies.
Men must focus on her thighs,

it is natural, don’t complain,
it is normal, not so formal,
the political poetry you refuse to hear

while she’s sitting on the pot
guarding Berryman’s candies
as the stupid war goes on.

The Dubyamobile

The Presidential Motorcade


The motorcade of black Suburbans
speeds down a farm to market road
on the way to Crawford, Texas.

The mighty moron who’s leading the nation
straight to hell
ignores anti-war protesters

and thumbs his nose at Cindy Sheehan
and the rest of America.
He keeps driving

towards Animal Farm
where all the Bushes oink oink all day long.
You can not see him

behind the tinted windows as he drives by,
going on vacation to come up
with more ways to screw the country.

The Day Undone

The bullets flew out of his body
and back into the pistol
and Mark David Crapchrist

pulled the bullets from the chamber,
subwayed his crazy ass back home,
never got the autograph,

never talked to John at all.
This is the moment that really belongs
in the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame

and not this sick, fucking bastard
trying to visit his parents,
his psychoanalyzed mind

still outsmarted by the scum and filth,
putrid on the best New Jersey street
as he shuffled his slimy feet

on his way to Bethlehem
to be aborted
and the day undone.

Fergie

Henry’s Elegy for Your Humps

My humps my humps my humps
my lovely lovely mounds
can’t you tell they look like camel humps

my humps my humps my humps
my lovely female bumps
my lovely little humps

my humps my humps my humps
they drive the lions crazy
you like what I got in my trunk

in the back and in the front
you gotta watch them elliepfonts
they step on you they make you grunt

my jeans don’t fit no mo’
honey bring me the breast pump
my pump my pump my pump

Montecito

An entomologist is not a Volkswagen
said Rexroth in his broth,
“Help me, Rhonda” by the Beach Boys

was playing on Radio Free Europe.
On the street corner
stood a group of illegals

waiting for odd jobs,
talking in Spanish about a woman’s behind
as she hurried by

aware of the eyes like reptilian fear.
Rexroth closed the window
to keep out the noise

of the world going by.
The Phoenix And the Tortoise,
Tu Fu, gesundheit

to a generation that sneezed protest
and got nothing in return.
Let the enemy learn to burn in hell.

Austin,Texas 2005 Police Cruisers

The French Fry Connection

Julie Shroeder and Popeye Doyle,
the Keystone Cops of Austin, Texas,
snuff out a Chicano kid

and come off as heroes to Internal Affairs
headed by Detectives Moe, Larry and Curly.
Getting rid of minorities they say

is not racial profiling
even though somebody had to die
they insist that these people

are just a cyst and not quite human
if you get my drift they insist again.
The Keystone Cops live to murder another day.

You won’t want fries with this
Ronald McDonald inspired investigation.
The Hamburglar said all the burgers are accounted for.

Sgt. Pepper

Henry’s dressed like Sgt. Pepper,
purple, yellow, green and baby blue.
Focus your eyes on the locust blur.

Eleanor Rigby, who could see her?
Her waistline she kept in line
by starving her poetry,

Dry Tortugas, Dry Virgins
in the Gulf of Mexico.
Her smile a tuba to all.

But the band played on
concentrating on the other instruments,
the guitars, the drums, the bass,

the sound clung to the molecules
of the right-wing fools.
John opened his jacket

to expose what we already know,
we’re going the wrong way, Jose,
and the heartbreak will not go away.

Hull

The ocean beats the rocks at Hull,
the currents between the islands and the bay
pencil-in the clams.

When the tide goes out
the spine travels
all the way to England,

there’s nothing bitter in my Alexander Pope.
John Hancock wrote his name down
as John Hancock.

The pond at the Boston Commons
was iced-over with Agamemnon.
Nearby, a girl in tight jeans,

sweatpants underneath
like a fine snowflake,
walked up the hill to Cheers.

I thought I saw Tino Villanueva
showing his diploma
to a cowboy from Oklahoma.

His Tejano roots have become suspect
as he flies out of Logan,
tail-fin like a frozen flower.

He swirls into the sky
and soon he’s five miles high
but you can’t go home again.