Mexico and Guatemala Poems
out in the darkening water as the end of our world draws my smoke up into its sky-mouth
Hi, friends. If you are following along, perhaps you’re aware that there’s a 2-year gap between my most recent posts, and where and what I was posting about when everything stopped. A quick recap in non-poetic language: I was living in the Yucatan some two years ago, and I was in very bad shape. I had a different plan then—no plan, really—but a different plan for this Substack. I wanted to write travel essays and poems and talk about trauma. This has changed. I’ve changed, radically.
The writing I’ve been putting out these last few weeks is all recent, but today, in light what is occurring in the United States—the unbelievable weight of it, the terrible terrible collective fear and fury—I want to give you poems. Poems that I wrote when I believed I was dying, and all that I understood of the world was ablaze. Broken poems about learning to live in The Now. Wrenching, imperfect poems never good enough to be published but slashed with anguish, mad and shattered. It feels as those words and images may have use.
Currently, I’m in Cuenca, in the highlands of Ecuador. Tomorrow, I go into the Amazon. The jungle calls me, and the chill nights here clench and tighten my shoulders, my pen. There is much to say and also no need to say much of anything anymore. We witness. We throw sand in the gears. Piss in the gas tanks. Slow them down however we can. Slow ourselves down and breathe for once. We need grounding during this grieving. The lives of so many rests on our learning to hold this brutal vibration in our bodies and continue to rise each day to tend and fight and teach and save. And yes, weep, and yes rage.
I’ll be publishing something here Thursdays for now, and ideally something lighter and traveloguey on Tuesdays as well.
ATV Couple, and other arrows to the heart
There are images I want you
to have seen through my eyes:
walking at dusk on a highway in Mexico
an elderly couple pulls out of a side street
right in front of me astride a mud-spattered
ATV—she’s in an electric pink lace dress,
hiked high, sitting way back, her hand
light on his shoulder. He’s as frail
as her, arms comically outstretched
on the handlebars, wearing a faded brown
pinstriped suit jacket & chrome-tipped
cowboy boots. They both look over
eighty, seem to be one person
in two bodies on the broad, gleaming
seat of the machine. They don’t speak.
He gazes up the highway through the glare
of headlights gauging his merge.
She looks beyond me, somewhere
over my head, her deeply wrinkled
face empty of emotion. She’s wearing
a white helmet backwards.
The fiberglass brim’s enameled
curve catches the light and
—my heart clenches beauty so intense I stop walking—
watch them buzz away
to the south, wondering
where they are going wearing
fancy dress clothes that look borrowed
from their grandchildren, how
the chances are high they only own
one helmet between them, marveling
at the way—when he abruptly shifted
into the heavy traffic—
her fingers tightened.
This Vegetal Howling and Other Dreamstates
Who knows what you’ve held
back—sweat ringing the handle
& dripping down
the tines—broomsticks
lathered with bear grease,
a dark vegetal howling, moon—
There are gongs broader
than continents crowded around
your neurons.
Do you hear the knell?
All these visions your swarm
of light, all these visions yourself, too,
and you peering into that stone well,
instead of tumbling into the
yes/and yes, and yes ... and
you already know there are ghosts
that will use your hips like a wrench,
and saying no más no más no más only led to his hands
around
your throat.
Don’t
you remember? You fell into
this dream. The diaphragm
is a boundary,
too;
every lamentation forms
a pattern.
XELA BBQ
The delivery driver of the place that sells barbecued meat on the corner
slings his leg over his motorbike
takes the knot of the black plastic bag
loaded with Styrofoam containers
of hot takeaway food
into his mouth
holding someone else’s dinner between his teeth/
I’m standing waiting to cross the road.
It’s good that there are speed bumps on either side
of the crossing. Safer that way though I often hear
undercarriages scraped and chassis crunched
when taken too fast/
The driver clenches his hand, punches it
through the intersection. He doesn’t even
look/
accelerates from jeaned leg over the gas tank
to biting down to nearly 50 in the space of
3 blinks ripping up the road in a roar/
I imagine the recipient of the hot
chicken roasted pork thin tough skirt
steak, and how hot how hot
their dinner will be/
oh how we burn,
the charcoal, lighter fluid
cigarette, gasoline, flesh
time itself/
Beginning the slow walk up the long hill
gasping, my heart punching
me from inside,
my hostess stops me as she’s driving by—
the power is out, will be out for a day or longer
she’s going to get candles, she’s so sorry for
the inconvenience/
house is dark, room is dark, I gauge
the power left on my phone my laptop
my heart
and take off only my boots get under all the covers
for the clouds
have come over the hill
and cold fog/ everywhere
las nubes/ and nothing burning
except my one candle
which gutters out after an hour/
Using the last of my laptop power
to write this one poem, I will spend the rest
of the night gazing into the darkness
with my sore and muddled eyes
thinking about that hot chicken
traveling up the hill at such speed
the liquid acceleration,
and the faith one man has
in his machine,
in his
clenched jaw./