if fear costs more than anger, it must be expensive

[a week and a half old poem, but still not yet moldy]

I awoke to a headache. It was raining and a leaden, duck eggshell grey. We take a bus to the nice part of town. Still too early to find a coffee shop on a dreary Sunday. Only church-goers abound. Even their bright, elaborate hats, like a 5^th grade science project stooped atop their done-up hair, can’t brighten the mood. The rain attacks us from all sides in an attempt to kill our smiles. It knows I have a headache.

We buy overpriced coffee and a sandwich. Chicken salad. It’s watery and the bread disintegrates on the plate before making it to my mouth. The most overpriced and disappointing sandwich I’ve bought in this country. I pay angrily and head back outside.

The rain has stopped and the sun feigns an interest in warming the concrete. It doesn’t last long. At least, the few short moments of light tear the awning off of our mood and tug the sides of my mouth into a half-smile. We walk toward the bus stop. I see a drugstore and go in. I need shampoo.

The attendant knows his stuff. He hands me a small bottle of baby shampoo, which his 7-year old assistant helps sell with the Cheshire cat grin duct-taped from ear to ear. She tries speaking to me in English. She gets a genuine smile out of me. I’m zero for two.

We leave feeling lighter. Who thought baby shampoo could make you feel that good? Two steps out of the drugstore and a beggar starts walking with us. Like everyone else who feigns interest, he expects me to give him money. He’s hungry. And persistent. I tell him sorry, I can’t. I’d like to put food in his mouth, but there are too many hungry people on this continent for me to feed alone. I can’t. I turn to her and keep walking but he follows. He’s persistent. After twenty paces he comes back up to us and propositions again. We’re waiting for the bus and I repeat: I’m sorry. I can’t.

So he pulls out a knife with an eight inch blade and unfolds it in my face. He looks through my eyes and tries to feel what it’s like to yank the fear out of me. I consider my options. It feels like twenty minutes pass as I reach into my pocket and pull out a crumpled wad of bills. It’s nothing. I hand it to him, dreaming of plowing my knuckles through on back to his molars and leaving his face in a blood-drenched heap. He dumps the coins back into my hand and stuffs the bills in his pocket. If you’re going to rob someone, don’t you want all that they have? It was at least a bus fare. Was it supposed to mean he had a heart?

A police car comes five minutes later and I jump inside. He drives superficial loops around a block. It’s the wrong block, and I know we have no luck of catching the bastard.

My thoughts go between artificial humanitarian sentiments and ones of utter rage. Is it fair to be against the criminal justice system, yet want to drag my robber to the chopping block? Where do we draw the line between righteous ideals and revenge that feels oh-so-right?

I wait for a bus in the rain. Zero for three. I imagine myself like a judo master. I gut him in the street and leave him in misery in the rain. Today, anger only costs ten bucks.

an air so deadly

Of life in the barrio:

The blistering sun whips at our backs.

The welts rise in bubbles of sweat.

Our pores are attacked by floating clouds of decay.

They surround us. We become them.

We wake at the smell of one thousand burning bottles

and abandoned bloated road kill.

This rich painting is the landscape we call home.

We lie amongst the clouds as insects dissect our surroundings

and inhabit our bodies.

My brain fills with cockroaches.

My clothes are replaced by a colorful weave of scorpions.

Their claws grip to our skin so our shorts stay at waist level.

Their stingers cool us like the evening breeze.

The heat hacks at our throats without mercy

and we bleed thick waves of salty sweat.

While flies climb towards our filling bellies,

rubbing their hands like a delighted, crooked stockbroker,

they are confronted by a militia of laughter.

Mosquitoes hate nothing more than a porch full of children laughing.

We stoke the trembling fires of their smiles with Americana folkloric melodies

in reciprocation. Their smiles widen.

The cockroaches, mosquitoes, and thousands of hovering, starving flies can’t stand the happiness

through which we bear their biting.

They retreat to the clouds of smoldering refuse. They feast on it

and wait until the joy, the laughter, has subsided.

It is hard for them to find solace.

Just when they think they’ve spotted it, utter despair,

their flapping wings are berated by yet

another onslaught of unadulterated felicity.

We revel in their failure.

Later, our backs melt under the sun's evil stare:

you don’t belong here.

So we retreat.

He laughs at us as we flee into the hills. Our feet carry us like the lines of scurrying ants up

boulders and across centuries to paradise.

We awake to fresh air for the first time in months. Our lungs go into shock.

They sing out like a gospel choir, blessing the sweet breath of life.

But we betray our lungs

And return to plastic-filled dirt streets

American-dream injected rows of poverty.

The earth shutters a brighter blue

Here, our home?

somewhere between the bricks and the sidewalk

[a long overdue poem inspired by the old men of Oaxaca City]

With both feet rooted deep into the concrete, hands shoved far into his pockets as if they were digging for a childhood memory, on the corner he stands sentinel. Alert but dozing off, by the look in his eyes his body is not more than a standing corpse. With nothing left inside but a heart, beating a foreign rhythm at half the intended pace, and only enough bones to withstand his stupor, he lives and he breathes sustained only by that which his corner provides. He's never seen another block in his life, but the wrinkles run so deep in his face that they appear to have been carved sharply into him by prolonged overexertion; a staggeringly distant voyage that peeled off thick flakes of him like a rusty chisel.

His skin is the Sahara. When it rains his body drains the water in like a sponge. The millions of tiny drops will never see daylight again. They become him. He doesn't leave the corner. He sits there round the clock, standing guard of the cracks in the pavement and the chipping bricks in the wall behind him. He is their foundation. Like a rock worn smooth after years of braving the tide, he stands tall in an unremitting slouch.

His eyes glaze over with the thick sugar that only time, patience, and the absence of love can afford. Behind them lie caverns darker than the last stop of the last train before daybreak, whose drowsy, screeching brakes will, in time, coax the sun to rise slowly to his post.

In this darkness, however, there is no emptiness. For with only one corner to see, 300 bricks to guard in a lifetime, a passing day is filled with nothing but one million thoughts. A distant horn is more magnificent than Mozart’s finest opera, a foreign smile his favorite novel. Between the bricks and the sidewalk, bricks and the sidewalk, all he can do is read. His life is but to listen.

He does not watch for his eyes are trained never to leave the maze of lines and cracks sprawling across the ground before him, the atlas engulfed by a crowd of ants who scurry in droves to avoid his gaze. A blue-green river of recycled water and expired laundry detergent sweep away lost candy wrappers and abandoned cigarette butts in the crevice between the road and the sidewalk. They are the ocean that numbs the crumbling concrete beneath his feet; a black hole in which no one steps for fear of being swept away just the same. If they were, they would find themselves in a land where punk playbills carpet the earth, cellophane chandeliers hang from a plastic bag sky, and the cereal box roof piggybacks on pillars of long-emptied cans of re-fried beans.

The man, aware of this world, though he's never seen it through his sugar-glazed eyes, avoids it with the same concentration as the ants who run thrice as fast, a boulder of bread propped atop their shoulders, to escape his gaze.

He is the watchman. He grazes one corner for a lifetime yet floods every street and alley with his everlasting presence. He is creased like an undying fold between the bricks and the sidewalk. Hand outstretched, palm peering towards the hatefully bright blue sky, and eyes venturing nowhere but inside, he assumes his post.