Four Pictures

Devki

Entrance Basics

Jewelry Vendor's at Dusk on Colaba Causeway, Mumbai

Woman and Grandaughter, Elephanta

Written 42 years ago . . . Baltimore, MD, 1966:

February Snowstorm Testament

Squirreled up in the apartment on Charles, I see
Through the fire escape bars outside the back window
How the snow still falls, not
On the world but on a part of Baltimore
That hasn’t yet found a world to be part of.
Earlier, with Carol at a sauerkraut and sausage place
Near the water, I lost my temper when she told me
A boy in men’s garb is still a boy even with dickhair.
If, following that, my fuck you didn’t KO her, my
Skipping out without paying after telling her
I had to take a leak and would be right back did.
It’s hours later now, after one a.m. and what do I care
What anybody thinks?
My loyalties are with those like me
Whose beer bellies, filled
With nervous butterflies that cough like bulls
And rattle our lonely bodies and bony skulls,
Never will feel good again
Until we waken completely into idiocy, finally free
Of that clarity which kills more minds than it helps.
Adoring Jesus is for losers. Winners love only the ghastly.

Photo: “Free the child from every oppression but most of all from purity”

Portrait of Che Prasad Jackson in American Visionary Arts Museum, Baltimore, MD, 8/16/2008

*

Note: Arc of writing in white letters on black background in artwork's top half says, “I honor those who try to rid themselves of any lying, who empty the self and have only clear being there”

El Fanguito
for Elesio del Manzano,1944-1968

Wrapped in a blanket stinking of fish, she gazes out
at what’s disappeared: the toddler chewing
a breadcrust in the dust. You.

Tell your mother to stop looking, Elesio.
You’re gone, and your brother Diego, well . . .

The heart died, the tidal marshes smell
and now the loan payment’s due.
Tonight when the bomba drums thunder
even your nonexistence won’t protect you.

Making tea, squatters boil shadows in a pot.
From somewhere else, the fried plantain’s scent
arrives, an awakening
like the Virgin’s nipple stiffening in the Christ child’s mouth.

Oyeee! Let’s dance tonight!
Moon lava drips through roof cracks, lighting
corners filled with the unseen’s permutations
while beyond the slum’s borders
the maggot plays guitar in the café of the dead tanager’s gut! Listen
to it sing “mi querida hermanita”
to the nun’s illicit offspring screaming
in the junkie’s eyes as he jabs the syringe in, killing
history’s linearity and making the palm tree stand still in the windy night.
Ah, here in love’s slum, God
is the fungus that grows in the petri dish
between the legs of the beaten hygienist pimped by a mafiosi disguised as freedom’s Don Juan.

I’m here but you aren’t. Dressed
as silence’s compañero, branches
tied to your helmet, you hide far away, a stag
in the underbrush, and wait.
Who would’ve thought it’s deer season along the Mekong?
One shot and you fall. Antlers scrape dirt.

Listen how back home the bomba drums deafen! -- the surly sea pounding rocks, the inchoate’s meaning.
No tourist should visit the beach tonight. There, each mugger’s a mystic who knows that if he smashes open a skull he’ll find an angel to fondle.
(“May I,” he’ll beseech the being, “remove your wings?
May I whip your flesh until it bleeds with a knowledge of the unforseen?”)

And so. And then.
Rosa’s Uncle Jimmy once grew cucumbers and tomatoes not far off. Now
a petrochemical factory’s there, disgorging smoke
blacker than a Taino’s nostril hairs.

Rooster with a pecked-out eye,
blood on the abandoned warehouse floor,
cops track down the cockfight,
everybody stampedes out the door.
Tan dónde están usted, Elesio, heh?
In the end, our sobs can’t pay the rent.

The stench of puked flounder on your mother’s blanket. The stomach
cancer did it
and too many other things to count.