Self-Portrait In A Convict’s Mirror

You young punks will not remember
when the pinto poets emerged
upon the scene machine,

a toda maquina,
the knives, the bullets of the words
they were shooting from the hip.

Ricardo Sanchez, raulsalinas,
whatever their crimes
they turned into rhymes,

Hechizospells from hell,
the iron bars that held raul
and his raza in the mind jail.

When the pinto poets looked in the mirror,
they didn’t see themselves---
they saw all of us!