Juan Diego ,Round Two

I have a scab on my ass,
I have named it Muhammed Ali.
Yes, I took a bad spill on my Harley.

While I was tumbling,
I kept calling the Lord’s name in vain.
Jesus fucking Christ.

Confined to the hospital bed
I tried to solve Zen koans
as if they were Baptist not Buddhist.

Only the ugly scab remains.
Nevertheless, I’m well on the way to recovery
relying solely on Our Lady of the Ring.

…I’m so full of holes
I whistle when the wind blows…

John D. Graham

Whipping Boy

I wandered lonely as a cloud,
the whipping boy of society.
No one published by bloody books.

No one complained
when the best jobs
went to Junior.

White girls
couldn’t be offered
to the brown boy’s neck.

Oh, no, you’re brown as hell
you can’t live
amongst us.

So I wandered lonely as a cloud,
despised for shouting rain.
No one published my angry heart.





Being a Chicano poet nowadays
means having to dig down deeper
than ever to find that chicanidad
that once flourished right here on
the surface of Aztlan. It is not
American society that is destroying
the Chicano poet, it is the Chicano
himself who is erasing himself.
A dying breed indeed.

She Blinded Me With Science
Or Stranger In A Strange Land

My mother was a miniature black hole
sucking in the world around her,
spitting me out the other side.

Sure, you don’t like the way I turned out,
mean, brash, insulting little fellow,
despised and deprecated.

I see no problem with that,
being tossed through the back end of galaxies,
the black holes made me resilient,

rebellious, raunchy, rattrap,
don’t really care what you think
or say about me.

I have been squeezed to nothing,
looked out from the inside of an atom,
kicked electrons out of their silly orbits.

The only strange particles
I ever encountered
were the ways of you white folks.

Brown Like Me

The trees know I am here,
leaf by leaf, limb by limb,
root by root.

I have brought my lunch
to wait them out,
silly as that my sound.

I have books in my backpack,
mostly poetry,
and some history.

I see the trees
examining their rings
as they nod at me.

They seem to accept the fact
that I am sincere.
They do not put up a fight.

But one brown leaf
can not be accounted for
until it dawns on me.


...dammit,some fool ass doctor
done went and re-started
Cheney's heart...

Buying Cigars

Ladies and Gentlemen, I hold in my hands
a container of propane,
roses in the form of gas

somewhere on this foggy planet.
A rusty nail bounces
on the waves

as I toss it with my left hand
like Shelley
and the salt air tastes of Italy again.

A newspaper rolled into a ball
flies down the street
where a strange visitor

grabs it, reads its jagged roundness
and spills his eyes on the spot.
I go into the cigar store,

flirt with the girl behind the counter,
born with bad ovaries
she can not reproduce thank God.

Code-Switching

I surround an ice cube
with my leaves of thunder
to defeat the valley

left behind by the war
that killed-off all the jackets
I ever owned.

Is this why I’m standing here
in my T-shirt and shorts,
the jpeg of a woman

who has lost her wolf
wallpapered on my laptop?
I don’t know

how to answer the question.
My hands are so cold
that they are being swept

along the dirt floor
of the hogan and my Navaho
grandmother’s nitpicking again.

The first Beatle to visit America was George Harrison in September 1963. At the time, the Beatles were fairly unknown, and George was visiting his sister, Louise, in Benton, Ill. During his stay, he played with a band called the Four Vests in nearby Eldorade. The crowd didn't know who he was, but he soon blew them away.

For you with a Lorca fetish click here.

A major exhibition of more than 30 international artists and musicians - from flamenco singer Enrique Morente to the deadpan artistic duo of Gilbert & George - will open this weekend at the summer retreat in Granada of the early 20th century Spanish poet Federico García Lorca.

The poet's summer home in La Huerta de San Vicente will be peppered with modern tributes to his life and work, including photographs, music, sculptures and paintings.

Bastille Day

Her only soulmate was a mouse
which came and went as it pleased.
Why is it only animals are truly free?

What thoughts could this mouse converse,
neurons focused on crumbs,
miniature galaxies of taste,

devoid of Tabasco and time.
Yes, a clock with no hands, no numbers,
no roundness at all.

The Mayans were wrong
about everything cyclical,
are the smart ones nearby to debate?

The mouse flicked its mustache
and scurried into a hole in the wall.
Emily turned over in her cot.

Her dreams burst forth,
two white horses being pulled
by a gilded chariot,

the forest thick with robbers,
hills slippery as ice,
foliage snickering ankle-wise.

She woke up in a cold sweat.
The night lay in a puddle
convincing like a tower.

Another Fine Mess You’ve Gotten Us Into
(Go Ahead, Fiddle With Your Tie!)

In prison Emily was raped by dykes,
by guards, by the warden’s wife.
When Emily wasn’t in solitary confinement,

she was allowed an hour in the sun.
The sun’s penis calmed her
and she despised women.

The clouds were poems
floating on a New England river,
trout jumped from vowels,

but just when the skin of the stones
was stretched to the breaking point,
the guard would tell her,

“It’s time, Emily.”
Back into her cell she went,
rolled up like the ball at the end of this line. O

Doing Time

When the siege was finally over,
they brought Emily out in handcuffs,
her face towards contempt.

She made a fist in solidarity
with no one. At this stage of the game,
there are no more Brown Berets,

no more Black Panthers, no Weatherunderground,
no more Royal Chicano Airforces,
oh, Stokely Carmichael where are you?

Emily will no doubt rot
in a gang-run Texas prison
where there’s no difference between warden & prisoner.

James Dean burned alive in the desert,
Che got chupacabraed in Bolivia, Crane went insane.
Emily, there’s nothing to be gained from poetry,

get it through your thin skull,
ruminate, concentrate,
and, stay out of my damn truck!

Survival Of The Fittest

I hear sirens as the SWAT Team
is called to the school
to swat at Emily.

Where’s that Cosa Nostra-infested Guiliani
when you really need him?
After eight hours of negotiations

Emily releases the children.
She’s holed up in the library
with the teachers,

she jams each and every one of her poems
to their throats.
The Chief of Police has fleas

and the trigger-happy snipers
eat their boogers.
They’ve never outgrown that nasty habit.

The Chief tells Emily over the loudspeaker,
“I’m a macho man
and you’re a sniveling poetess.

Come out with your hands in the air
or we’re coming in shooting!” Emily yells
out a window, “Come and get me, copper!”

This pisses of The Three Little Pigs.
Oh, the lives of poets---
some jump off bridges,

some jump off ships,
some put their heads in the oven
and the unlucky ones survive.

My Emily Dickinson?

The next day there she was again,
re-reading the same Hart Crane poems
which are despised by the multitudes,

abhorred by illiterate aborigines,
not small enough for the pigmies,
not gay enough for the gay,

not Mexican enough for the wetbacks,
not racist enough for the Klan,
not brave enough for the Marines.

Emily begins to see why
Crane was so misunderstood
and misunderstood by so many.

She slams the door of my truck shut
like a clam.
Skinny as pecan trees in winter

she hurries up the street,
disappears into an elementary school,
endangering kids with her poetry.

My Emily Dickinson


This morning I stepped outside
and found Emily Dickinson sitting in my truck.
2007, stick shift, six cylinder, single cab.

She appeared to be reading
The Complete Poems of Hart Crane,
which I always keep under the seat.

I climbed into the bed of the truck
as quietly as I could
and she did not notice me.

She had the book cracked open to The River,
spent a long time reading it
and re-reading it.

Next, she read The Dance
over and over again.
Finally, she put the book down,

opened the door ( I lay down
so she wouldn’t see me).
She walked to the neighbor’s car,

finding no books there,
she went from driveway to driveway,
shoulders hunched, curly hair limp against the breeze.

I went back inside the house,
grabbed her book of complete poems
and hung it on the rear view mirror,

drove all around the neighborhood,
drove all around town, hood open, doors open,
honked the horn all the while and drove home empty-handed.

Poem In November

Now when I was young and greasy,
I arrived home on the school bus
(Mr. Springs always made me sit in the back),

mom was lying in bed,
I don’t know if she was sick
or pregnant with Esteban,

but there was nothing to eat.
I went to the kitchen table,
found a pot

with a few cold beans at the bottom.
I ate them and then went outside
to play in a field of dead cornstalks,

I re-arranged stones in the creek,
and hid in the bamboo thicket,
but, to this very day I can not forget that vivid hunger.




…this memory haunts me. I can only remember
getting off the bus, running home and discovering
mom in bed, I told her, “mami, tengo hambre.”
but she did not respond. I remember dragging the
pot to the edge of the table and eating the beans
and then going outside to play, still hungry. I wish
I could remember more, but I can’t. It frustrates me.
My mother died in childbirth not long after that.
Was this just yesterday? Do I add some kind of
proteins to that memory every time I think of it
and make it even more painful? It gnaws at me,
right here in the pit of my stomach like a wolf,
fangs exposed, stepping back before the
attack…




[Sure, you might say, why does he not
concentrate more on the racism implied by the
Mr. Springs character? Because he leaves the
exterior world to Rosa Parks and others like her.
Because this hunger, not really for food, but for
his mother, remains unrequited, and surfaces like
a babbling brook throughout his life---Editors note.]

Prieta,your birthday is noted.

Convertible

The girls break down the door,
offer Davy all the pleasures God dictates.
The other Monkees descend from the trees,

frolic amidst discarded panties.
Peter toys with the idea
that his mother’s side of the family

is cousin to the spiders.
A spinning Jenny is busy making
Mike’s new cap.

Davy is washing up,
climbing into his Monkee boots---
akin to Beatle boots but less well-known.

The girls wag their tails like puppies.
Our heroes speed away
with the top down, their eyes aglow.

Hide In Plain Site

Davy needs a shower
much like Adam and Eve after they
got kicked out of paradise by the Big Bopper.

Davy clowns around
with the toilet tank
which is the spitting image of Petula Clark.

Peter compares his stupid hair
with that of James Brown blaspheming cotton,
Bozo Bob Dylan fumbles Baez.

Mike picks lice from his head.
Ah, a perfect breeding ground
for the ground.

The girls are knocking at the door.
Davy has forbidden hisself revolution
for the ninth time today,

assuring us that he won’t be shot
by some deranged fool
if he tarries here.

Biblical Chicks Gone Wild
Or Davy Jones Lockergnome

Why (arms akimbo), even Mary Magdalene
is enamored of Davy,
look at her lift up her skirt!

She’s hotter than Mike’s head
under that infernal knit cap.
Somebody please pour some goat’s milk on her.

An ass poses as the MonkeeMobile,
and all the ancient maidens
caress the grille

wishing it was Davy’s butt.
Mary swings at them in jealousy,
her tits bounce up and down.

Envious Peter clowns around.
The conductor shouts,
last train to Clarksville.

Nearby, bikini-clad girls splash
on the beaches of the Dead Sea,
and Roman soldiers conquer boys.

Tambourine Hero

Davy throws off the shroud,
slaps at the dust, blinks,
tries his best to think,

and begins to run for his life
as a mob of teenage girls rounds the corner.
He runs all the way to Venice.

Swims up the Grand Canal,
bumps into a gondola,
sighs underneath the Bridge of Sighs

as he is pulled out of the water
by the other Monkees.
Peter plays a funny base note,

Mike strums a- ta-da-da-DA chord.
The pigeons shit all over Davy,
but won’t soil Lennon.

Yvor Winters said of Peter Tork (And, I think, rightly so),
“He is Whitman trying to express a loose America by
writing loose poetry. This fallacy, the fallacy of expressive,
or intuitive form, recurs constantly in modern Monkee
literature.”

from page 62
In Defense of Tree Sons
Yvor Winters

… ah, the cymbalism, the cymbalism…



The Gospel According To The Monkees
(Mind you, Peter Tork is still a Dork)


There’s a kind of hush when
they pull him down from the cross.
I guess they showed him who’s boss.

Sleepy Jean caresses him
and tells him it will be okay.
But, what else is she supposed to say?

Oh, them Romans are such kidders
except when they get angry
and drink too much brandy.

They’ll feed you to the lions…
they’ll let the elephants trample
every single slave from head to ankle.

There’s no milk in Clarksville tonight.
They’ll wrap you in a shroud
and you’ll be dragged thru the streets by a Turin crowd.

Flipping ‘Em The State Bird Of Texas

Just because Our Lady of Guadalupe
appeared to Edgar Allan Poe in Taft, Texas,
that don’t makes him welcome.

Walt Whitman tried to ride a bucking bronc.
At his age. And what was he thinking
trying to grow a ZZ Top beard?

Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote the first
poem about female masturbation.
We don’t lao that kinda smut in Texas, dearie.

Kenneth Rexroth tried to import
Japanese poetry across our borders.
We don’t cotton to haiku scaring our purple cows.

And that wimpy e. e. cummings aimed to
steal the music of our mockingbirds,
but the tinhorn was booted with proper punctuation.