Casket to my bedroom mattress
Slapping wrists with necrophilics
Indulging over the soul
Sifting through metaphysics
Foreign Policies

Caliphs to militant factions
Naked Bodies
Accorded law
Mirrored deities
Animated shadows ‘neath
Courtroom stalls

Because,
This is where being human stops
When I’ve slept with Destiny
Two World Wars
Fixated at noon…
Hands fondling her hair
Sun sat in her eyes

Wearing my shirt she asks,
“Why do I feel morning sickness?
(IF)
Tattooed onto your lips is tomorrow
Senseless
Perpetual submission
Every whisper you gave
Philosophizes the alleyways
Of broken sentences
Nietzsche’s origami
Clasped under pious ashtrays

You said you loved me
Clasping hands
Till stanzas do us

Part!
Clinging onto an unfinished hymn
Expecting God by nightfall”

“And as you fathom roses
Why am I always dark-skinned?
As if strokes of white
Darkened clouds
Silhouettes dancing around
A quivering fist
Politics of metaphors
Lobbying the front desk of prose
A preacher stands idle
Bowing down
Worshiping fonts
Letters, manifestos, opuses
-- chanting --
It’s hopeless
The nihilism of your pen…”

II

I respond:

Only coffee tables knew how much we talked
Our minds was Cold War
Romantic brinksmanship
That seeped into the mornings
Its opalescence
Your sarcasm incensed with
Fragranced remarks
Every clutch ricocheted
Steadfast
En passant,
Dogging sophism. With
White flats you marched

To the end…

Where paved street broke off
Common sense posed no avenue
Writhed hands palace
The ornate décor
Un rincón del cielo
Prometido pa los masses

Heaven a promise ring
Engaged to mortal fear
Hell
Our collective revenge
A saint’s wishing well

Questions of science
Of divinity
It’s all the same
Our desperate longing for finality
For a moon that greets you back

III

A touch of rosy hue ends this
Intact I trace the remains
Ashes of hopes that whisper to blades
Of grass
Why does the revolutionary’s mother leave history?

Through the looking glass,
Coffined in show white
Displaced by evening
Our dwarfed minds shrilled
At the sheer redress
Of determining our fates?
Utopian nonsense!
We are –
We are bastards of destiny!
Illegitimate to reason
Fathered by violence
Riddled with bias

That!
Is!
Man!

War without bloodshed
Politics socializes
I renounce allegiance to its [s]mothering
The ‘s’ be silent –

Flirting with virgin ideals
The canvas of tomorrow fades
Peace proposes the least
Makeshift laws usurping day

Wine-dining the coattails of illusion
Consecrating the deepest hates
To find where the truth is
Only,
It doesn’t exist.

Each his own tyrant,
Transfixed and
Jaded to stubborn dreams.
Regicide his last escape
Refined fragments of greed.

Individuality’s the biggest lie
Apollo’s last grip
Creating God,
Civilization,
And its Discontents

IV

And you,
Finger-painting
In a single acrylic
Half-listening to
My poetry’s dissidence
Your watercolors softening crimson
Absolved reminiscence
What I hold the closest.

Las rosas de Guadalupe
Flourishing between
Sidewalks
Candlelit memorials baptizing the dark
Cardboard epitaphs
Tattooed into
My patria’s grid-fence
Eventually forgotten
Primetime’s sixpence

I finally begin my lecture:

You?!

Policing the canvas
Indoctrinate souls
Of men
Isolating gang warfare as
Independent to matrices
of
Classist entrapment.

Human behavior

Under your guise
Is static
Undying to the material conditions
Man is infinitely born into

Poverty is indolence
Hierarchies immanent
Colleges of categories overwhelm
Educating us of our own intellect
Our societal worth.

You had it out on us at the onset.

Racism. Misogyny. Xenophobia.
Homophobia, Islamophobia.
Colonialism, Social Darwinism
Jingoism
Eugenics.

Plessey vs. Ferguson
Internment Camps
Operation Wetback.
Chinese Exclusion Act

The Red Scare, Madoff Affair
The Bay of Pigs Invasion
Aiding dictators:
Porifirío Diaz
General Pinochet, Rafael Trujillo,
Colonel Castillo
Shah Pahlavi, Saddam Hussein
Nicaraguan Contras

“Domino Theory”
The War on Terror
The Washington Consensus
The NAFTA premise
IMF loans

Regressive taxation
Lobbied legislation
Bailed-out recession

All.
Hallmarks of a plutocracy
To distract, incite anger, fear
European cobblestones
Paved atop indigent soil
And at last the Invisible Hand
Finishes its Garden of Eden

V

An-
I stop.
The tipsy chatter hushes.

“Bravo! Bravo! What do you want to call it?”
One man calls out
Middle-aged
The curator I believe.
Sporting a navy blazer

Applause in soliloquy.

Standing tables circulate
Red wine accents his speech
Eyes commodify
My Chicano pride
Comprise impeached.
Surveying the radical tapestry
Inconspicuously searching
For a price tag.

“This work of yours, intriguing stuff indeed”
Got a title?

I give a half-smile
Those smirks I’ve practiced for years
In the mirror
“Yeah, I do…

Wishful Thinking.”