Chicano Poet

Friday, August 28, 2009

The Death Of Fidel

I was going to Key West so I called my friend Diego
and asked him to meet me in Miami so we could visit
another old friend in Homestead. When I landed at
Wilcox Field I noticed something odd, but I could not
quite put my finger on it, then it dawned on me-----
no Cuban faces, no freaking Cubans at all. It was a weird
feeling. When Diego showed up that’s the first thing I
asked, what happened to the all the Cubans, dude, I
blurted out. Well, he said (if you’ve ever heard Daddy
Yankee talk, well, Diego’s voice is just as annoying)
since Fidel died all the freaking Cubans in the whole
state of Florida have gone back home to the island,
you’re fucking kidding me, right? I laughed, but he said,
no, man, I ain’t kidding, all the freaking Cubans have
gone back to freaking Cuba. Then and there I realized,
no more fine horny Cuban chicks, but, ah hell, I thought
out loud, they’re all bad tempered bitches anyway. Diego,
who was driving, said, yeah, man, but how about the
traffic? as we drove through an empty metropolis like
Harry Belafonte in The World, The Flesh And The Devil.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Metamorphosis

Gregorio Sanchez awoke from a fitful night of sleep or
non-sleep as it was. Suddenly he was wide awake, he
was horrified, he let out a grito and not the Padre Hidalgo
type of grito for he had just realized that his beautiful brown
skin was gone, he had turned pale white overnight, a freaking
albino. He dressed hurriedly and walked out into the barrio
intending to get to the bottom of it. Mexicans stared at him,
cursed him, brown children pointed at him, what is this
gringo doing in our neighborhood viejitas whispered, young
punks looked at him with distrust, afraid, thinking he was
a cop. Gregorio rushed to a dermatologist, he did all sorts
of tests on Gregorio. After a month the doctor told him
the bad news he had to bear. He would remain white for
the rest of his life. His family disowned him. Mexicans
talked about him not realizing he understood every painful
word they said.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Cute Mexican Girl Syndrome

The cute Mexican girl had legs of honey. Her tongue
flicked arroz con pollo, her triangle scented with
tortilla-like perfume. Her saliva coated my chest with
her jalapeño breath. The Austin, Texas cops were
prowling the streets looking for minorities to kill so
I told her let’s just stay home and make love all night
long which is what we did trying not to write a run-on
sentence if we could help it and afterwards we smoked
stolen cigarettes made from dried cilantro leaves
her hands like thunder once again but this time
La Llorona’s children ganged up on her and killed her
that’s when I woke up from the limerick and the cute
Mexican girl was telling me you drank too much terquila
with an “r” and just then the phone rang like a piñata
we’d bought for our two-year-old’s birthday party we
heard the fucking killer cops driving away to kill more
blacks and Mexicans which is their job I guess so who
are we to criticize says my white neighbor

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Texas Road Kill Verse

I was driving my pick up truck into the darkness
when I thought I saw a poem dash out in front
of me. I tried to apply the brakes, jerked the
steering wheel, I barely missed hitting the damn
thing head on. But it scampered off into the forest.
The trees got spooked, revealing their feet. I had
never seen trees run that fast. My pick truck stalled
since I forgot to push in the clutch, I restarted it
and drove away, my heart pounding like a haiku
in my chest. It was prose later before I finally calmed
down and realized what a close call I’d written.

Friday, August 21, 2009

In Another Life

In another life I met you
this time you were a hairy caterpillar

gone were your long golden locks
your pool of blue eyes

those two enchanting legs
replaced by a hundred

as we passed each other
on the moist decaying forest floor

you did not recognize me
you shuffled off sideways

a precaution you need not have taken
heartbroken I boxed a leaf

I tossed twigs at the dew
and sank onto my hind legs

Thursday, August 20, 2009






A Day In The Life Of Bexicana

Growing up I never had a sense of culture.
I remember asking my Mom where my family
was from. Her mother passed away when she
was three years old and for my mother, it
all stops there. My mother isn't even really
sure when her real birthdate is. I always
feel bad asking her things about her family
because she was raised by her grandparents
and feels like no one really wanted her.
I never asked my Dad, but my grandmother,
his mother, always seemed like she could
care less about talking about her family
history. She's the type of woman who would
get up everyday, get dressed, do her hair up,
and put on lots of makeup. NOTHING wrong
with that, except that it was only to sit
outside on her porch with her sisters...

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Jive Talkin’

It has often been pointed out that Paleolithic man
invented the comma and the period even though he
possessed a very primitive and rudimentary language.
He did draw humorous cartoons---it is said that Walter
Lantz is one of their descendants, some philologists
believe that e. e. cummings may also have branched
off from them. Rudolfo Anaya has disputed all of this
tomfoolery in his epic philological work, Bless Me,
Ultima.
A book of exhilarating thought and leaps of faith.
I myself believe that Anaya is correct. I believe that
Paleolithic man stole the comma and the period from
the ancient Mexicans. I believe that the Egyptians stole
the idea for the pyramid from La Malinche. Obviously,
more work lies ahead to prove Anaya’s theories, but I
think that day will come, and perhaps as soon as 2012.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

La Malinche

Many times maligned, La Malinche has been blamed
for much, and given credit for nothing. Her contributions
to new ways of corn cultivation are never mentioned,
nor her methods, wide-spread at the time, of female
contraception. Her breakthroughs in lyrical poetry,
greater than Sor Juana’s, are barely voiced out loud
at all today, avant garde in her own times, her works
remain avant garde even now. Neither Emily Dickinson
nor Sylvia Plath can compare to her. We owe the present
to her, and we will owe the future to her, too.

Monday, August 17, 2009

Mrs. Robinson

I was on a toboggan with Louise Bogan. This was in 1969.
She only had a year to live. So, she was living it up. She had
stopped writing poetry two minutes before I met her. I had
foregone my sixth year at Julliard School of Prance. Mexicans
weren’t created to tippy-toe, anyway. Louise, being a poet,
assumed that every snowflake was exactly the same. I told her,
no, no, nelson, there are actually two types of flakes. Square
and even squarer. (This squarer concept is hard to comprehend
unless you’re at whiz at math). She was astounded.

While I removed the feathers from the toboggan, she calculated
the distance between Point A and Point B which coincidently
turned out to be Stephen Hawking’s waist measurement.

Louise’s thighs like most old lady thighs do not excite young men,
not even Mexicans. Yet, I courted and wooed her, or she courted
and wooed me.

Friday, August 14, 2009

Stratford-Upon-The-Stove

Did Shakespeare eat tacos? That’s the burning
question. Did he eat left-handed beans or
right-handed beans? For you who are not bean
aficionados there is a tremendous amount of
difference between left and right-hand beans---
caused by the absence of one electron in the
right-handed bean. I personally feel that
Shakespeare did eat tacos otherwise I do not
feel (just a gut feeling) that he could have
written (or plagiarized from Ben Johnson) the
sonnets which were obviously influenced by
the folded tortilla. Ya estufas.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Lonely For A Cloud
(Wordsworthian Symbolism)

I fell in love with a cloud. I wished I had been born
a bird, a buzzard, a hummingbird, but, alas, I was
born a man. Yes, a man, one of nature’s worse
creations. Man who assumes he’s the most
powerful animal on the planet. I took flying lessons,
till there came a day when I could fly up to my
beloved, to take her flowers, candy. But she rebuffed
me, she did not want anything to do with me. I was
brokenhearted, and I resolved to love her from afar.
I watched her on the weather channel, on the
internet, and I downloaded the weather bug app
for my iPhone.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Is Poetry Only Six Thousand Years Old?

The poem (as most of you poets know) is a fickle creature.
Slippery, slimy, yet as coarse as West Texas sand. It can be
flowery, girlish, or have a foul mouth like a barroom brawler.
The poem can plummet to Davy’s locker, or reach escape
velocity. It can be a damp rag, a tin cup, a bolt, a football
stadium, and , yes, a poem can even be ( in verb form, of
course) the proverbial kitchen sink, Sumerian or otherwise.
A poem can hide out from the Spaniards atop Macchu
Picchu, or in the dilapidated barrios of San Antonio, Tx.
A poem can hide inside a chalice, or in the death camps
of Siberia and Guantanamo. A poem can shine in the sun,
or cuddle on the moon alongside the footprints of man.
A poem needs only one thing: the poet, and only to
reproduce its endless self.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em

I dreamed I was trapped inside a poem. The walls
were made of rusty, square nails which hung in
mid-air. It was deafly quiet. If I touched a nail, the
rust would fall off, and a brown, choking dust would
hang in the air for hours. I tried not to breathe it in,
I was afraid to scream for help. I saw no means of
escape. I kept thinking of a hammer. That’s what
being trapped inside a poem will do for you. You
have to start thinking like a poem, you have to start
behaving like a poem. You have to become the poem.
Soon I was wearing a suit of nails, and people refused
to touch me, they were afraid to touch me. I felt the
power surge in me. Words were collapsing around
my head like crumpled paper. I was inside the nails now.

Friday, August 07, 2009

And speaking of Dylan Thomas. The only daughter
of poet Dylan Thomas died of cancer at the age
of 66. Aeronwy Thomas-Ellis was heavily involved
in the Dylan Thomas Trust and often ran poetry
reading events and lecture tours about her father's
poetry.Aeronwy spoke to BBC Wales in 2003 about
growing up with father Dylan Thomas, 50 years
after the poet died.

Thursday, August 06, 2009

Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Tu Allá Y Yo Acá

Frida is caressing a hippo. She strokes its penis.
The water in the bathtub is muddy and full of
grassy hippo poop. You can see Frida’s pelvis
and how her vagina is attached to it, her clitoris,
once a stony pyramid, now grows green like
summer grass in Ireland. The hippo’s round
teeth do not trouble her. The hippo roars like
a third world nation. Frida’s flowery dress has
dropped its heart. Frida’s tits are flat like
tortillas. Finally she dries the hippo with a huge
towel the size of Texas. Years later, when we get
the towel back, it’s still wet.

Footnote: Frida did indeed marry a
character created by Botero.

Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Rhyme And Pun-ishment

Why were two flarf poets robbing a bank?
Where did they acquire the Uzis? And, could
they concentrate long enough to pull the trigger?
They handed the pretty cashier the note. To the
cashier who had never heard of flarf, it looked like
a harry k stammer poem. But the flarfists got
their money, they angrily threw the dye marker
at the old Mexican security guard who’d probably
fled Mexico during the revolution. They got into
their getaway car, a Smartcar, they barely fit
in it with their bags of stolen money. Suddenly
two cop cars were on their tail. One of the poets
pointed his Uzi out the window and took out
both patrol cars with one bullet. A police helicopter
appeared overhead. They shot the flying copper
out of the sky. Then they vanished into an
abandoned warehouse. They were never caught.
Who says rhyme does not pay?