You won’t understand
Why I ache to go back to
110 degree weather and just 1
Pair of shoes to last all year
La isla de indigente
Drunk with Dreams
No running water, no separate bathrooms,
No AC, no electricity,
No privacy
Stretches of dirt road tread
To a single rusted well, buckets of stale water
Soldiered atop red, skinny shoulders
Meals with no meat or bread
Dinnerware, a collection of discarded pottery
Dilapidated houses, Roads unpaved
Farms with hungry herds
Children with untreated conditions
Parents with unremarkable destinies
Who gambled away their few spare pennies on one big dream

You won’t understand
Why I went unphased by being broke
When there were valleys of flawless fruit
Free for the taking
And toothaches that were well worth
The liquid pleasure of raw sugar
Straight from the cane
Trees that were green all year round
Azul afternoons spent swinging
From hulking tree branches with my brothers
And nights spent staring into the inky twilight with my sisters
Gluttonous with wishes for every shooting star

I survived on my mother’s strong embraces
Enveloped in her arms when I came home with a skirtful of ripe manzanas
And the proud smile of my father
When I read him the books he could not
There was a pride in the way I swept the front steps of our poor house
That sheltered so many souls under one sinking roof,
A tenderness in having just 1 toy
To share with so many siblings,
And a romance in the way my parents sat together, side by side,
After a night of bitter arguing,
Vowing to make things perfect in all their future lives together
Despite their present
Lying irreparably broken

You won’t understand why
The sight of skyscrapers pains me
Why the architecture of the city landscape makes me think back
To white beaches and the bright blue waves of the Atlantic
Rolling in like punches,
To the innumerable seashells I lined along the shore with my friends,
To the taste of the ocean’s spray on our tongues,
Thinking the the lighthouse on Punta Tuna
Was God’s eye watching us

You won’t understand
How I spend every prayer
Asking to go back to the home I left,
To see the blood red silhouette of the flamboyans swaying in the island breeze,
Like a visage of my parents full hearts beating

“Let me see your soul,”
Says the man to the topless girl,
“I want to see what’s inside,”
Says the man, waving a thick wallet
To the girl with knees like knobs of ash
Hips like sticks and stones
She doesn’t hear him
Shaking her breasts
Spinning curls in her flat honey colored hair
Circling the pole with her tanned thighs
And a dry cunt that humps the phallic metal pole
Like the earth revolving around the thing it needs the most
Because it has to, because it knows no other way
“I need to see something the others wont,”
Says the man,
Redoing another button on his shirt
A blushing budding behind the starchy whiteness
And he says to her,
“This is nothing new,”
“This has been done before,”
And he puts his money away
Not finding what he needed the most
From the girl who would be the last to give it
All of her 18  years years has amounted to bare skin

And sultry moves in a dark room

He twirls the gold circle on his finger
Wonders where on the earth the answers are
When it’s not at home
And can’t be negotiated from someone
Who puts her privacy up for sale
The girl with full breasts and closed lips colored
In a wild shade of red,
Flashes a smile to a slob in the corner with a fantasy to fill
And a 20 dollar bill
She strips the last of her layers and shows
That a naked woman could be both beautiful
and Invisible

there is sex all around
painted lips,
strings and lace strapped to a headless mannequin
who silently hopes you might buy her thong
next to a woman on a street corner
gartered up and waiting
seeking profit in her privacy
she says can distance
the body and mind when it comes to
strangers and sex
while the man who negotiates
her asking price,
goes home to a wife who loves him, boringly
and a daughter who will grow up to be
the doting girlfriend to a married man or the whore
who flashes her own parts for free,the pretty fawn
the fool

this is for the homo sapiens who see beauty
in their bodies and their sex
but natural is numbing
and all the ancients who came before
with their body paint , corsets,
loose flowing clothes easily ripped off,
can’t understand that 101 ways to please your partner
is 101 too few

publication titles offer up
guides to be better in bed or some new mental trickery for thinking
you already are
bras, panties, ribbed-for-her-pleasure condoms, objects
to engage, to enhance, to entice, but
somewhere is a woman trying on her lingerie
spotting the flaws in her breasts and her hips
her lover is wondering if he can last this time or
if nothing about him is long enough
while somewhere a woman is forced into something she didn’t want while
a man pays for something he can’t get
and somewhere a couple will make love
thinking the moment will last always
but if you give enough time to anything
you’ll realize
it won’t

You will see white streaks on forearms
Pink zigzags on broken skin
Ask about his failures
At suicide, why he didn’t keep trying after
The dull knife didn’t cut until
His blue veins ran empty
Or until the assault of prescriptions
Wiped out consciousness
Question the single bullet
Loaded in some semi
Propped against his pillow

“Why cease even if the body resisted
When there were sharper knives, other pills
other rounds? What made you stop?”

You ask him,
Out of challenge

And he wrote it down
Quoted the wise words
Of the father
When he saw his son standing
At the window’s edge, promising
“You don’t always die. Sometimes
The highest peaks
The biggest doses
Don’t do it completely. And don’t forget
If you come out of it, alive
An invalid, a vegetable
It won’t be me
Who takes care of what’s left
Or finishes
What you couldn’t”

There are plenty of dead boys
Living, I’m telling you
You’ll see the burn marks, wrists stained
With slashes, temples moist and dented with the permanent curve
Of nights spent sleeping with the steel barrel too close
No, it’s not to remind themselves
That souls still live inside that skin
Those dark eyes purpled by nights
Waiting for some sign, tell you
They don’t

birthday cards for a 12 year old girl are taped to the front door
bending, falling over, like exhausted peels exposing bitter fruit
she eats half a box of sprinkled cookies in her mother’s bedroom
the girl without her own
at noon the summer sun a wild citrus barely peeks through
the thick shades of the ghetto and in the light of the television screen
she eats the other half, her company the sounds of audience applause happy
she was born today
puberty spent in front of that tv, shows repeated every season while sessions of obesity
and bulimia, obesity and bulimia, obesity and
the battle to be beautiful never won despite the shrinking skin

high school years in rooms full of eyes stuck on vanity and expectations, the eyes
that ignored the trembling hands plagued with razor wounds she gave herself
on the day she turned 16
no explanation really
none asked
like a beautiful woman who dresses herself in beautiful things
streaks of purple and blue, bloody lines decorated her arms, a teenage manifesto of
obesity and bulimia, obesity and bulimia, obesity and
the swan that resembled another animal
a bear, a boar, a beast

on the eve she turned 20 the girl’s dad died
the last conversation of shared stories of attempted suicide
the man whose DNA dripped from the veins she cut
in the shower flowing red, flowing clear, flowed red
deep red and down the drain
the rusted pipes, the rusted girl, dying or not dying
like her father, a man she could never say she knew well
even if she wanted to
insanity took his mind years ago, the streets before that,
drugs before that, a pedophile before that, his schizophrenic mother before that

the girl’s mother in mild shock helps burn the man she
left a long time ago, thought she had rid of the pauper, his uselessness
but the mother helped clear out a shelf, put his ashes next to books she never read,
a tv always in heat
she bought the cheap urn and the flames that made
his skin, his flesh, his manhood
infected with a lifetime of ignorance a
bed of gray matter
one last expense for the man, one more expense for the mother without money

on the day the girl turned 25, too old to be a girl
too young for the stretch marks and fatigue and nights in despair
that knew every season, she played cowgirl with a 6 foot rope
lassoed shadows on the wall, caught the line on a hook from the ceiling
let it hang in the dark, flirting with phantoms in the room
a quarter century old
she wondered how would it fit, unlike her clothes
unlike her skin, rough twine tight around her neck when,
the girl who had been falling her whole life,
fell, just like her father, the mother always said,
a bastard

In my house
My kingdom of junk piled high
The twinkle of decades built into this slum
Is mine
The old sofas and dusty curtains,
Jeweled lampshades with plastic diamonds swinging
On drafty evenings
Jars of food expired sitting on untouched shelves
Limp dirty shoes, books without covers
The beds of sons who have built their own empires
Lie empty, undressed
This house once full
Of faces with gilded teeth that emitted
The light of full moons and there were women
Who laughed from their stomachs until Carribean tears
Wet their silk lashes and men with the threat of
Volcanic sleep in their fists and their feet
Cooed in the arms of chirping wives
Heavy with cheap sherry and the spell
Of my spanish guitar that moved caramel thighs
In heated dances that did not end until
The walls erupted in spasms

Thousands of barefoot strangers
Filled my house
Beckoned by the wood instrument that made magic
In my hands, sitting on my porch, playing until blisters burst
Fingers swollen with music
The red sting of love in my song
They came from from avenues, windows, roofs
Poor dirty things with passions
Bigger than the mango sun over my country
They sat at my table gluttonous, drunk, infatuated
Spilling flowers and fruits to the floor
Crushed into a paste of perfume
And wine with their clumsy dances
Do not see my house, my throne, as a cemetary of time lost
To taxes, to politics, to heirs who wanted none of it
Stand under the veil of garbage that parades on the front lawn
See the footprints of so many starving
Strangers who who came into these walls
And left in an embrace of brotherhood, full

Stiff hammocks with asymmetrical patterns
Beaten down by weather
Rock with the elegance of old sneakers on telephone lines
Or dirty streams of toilet paper flapping from tree branches
We pledged a myriad of dreams on those battered things
Disintegrating in the backyard of my father
He, too lazy to take them down
Or do anything
Some things don’t change

The old man spells my name “Vicktor”
Looks more like “Xecten” in cursive, when he tries
Calls me “Juan”, his brothers name
Who owes him 10 dollars
Says he’s glad his wife left him
Though he’s had none
And waits for his dead mother to come home
She has to cook those plantains
for his first day of school tomorrow

In the back yard where we mapped our futures in blue chalk
on the large patio steps
Are a collection of ashy patches and those dull yellow weeds
I mistook for baby daffodils
Until you convinced me to make a bouquet of them for Luz
Who called me bruto and then left me

The crooked tree you tried to climb but fell
Because you wore chancletas instead of sneakers
Is still there, bearing no sign of the initials we never carved
Into it, but promised to
I held my ear to the trunk
Near the big hole where squirrels escaped to, sometimes rats,
With bits of food or tire, now empty
I listened for the echo of my voice when I spoke into it
When out came the hush of our childhood conversations
About the girls we thought we’d marry, & the girls we’d make our mistresses
The feasts we’d share with kings and gangsters
The countries we’d conquer with my father’s big machete,
You carried in your belt, calling yourself Don Quixote
Swatting and stabbing the trail of my costume,
The long brown dress of my grandmother you convinced me
To wear, saying, I had the shoulders of a stallion
And would make a handsome caballo

There were the unfinished Corona bottles
We stole from my father’s sleepy hands
And quarter potato chip bags we ate
Instead of dinner
The winter nights we swung from those hammocks,
The only things my father ever brought from the island
The scent of Cuba in every strand of rope
Each knot a fist from someone he left behind
Waiting for freedom
You said you did not mind the cold those evenings
Wrapped in nothing but our sweatshirts and blue jeans
Said you found the full view
Of sky muy chevere though I knew
It was your own father
You did not want to go home to
His hands as big as the beaches he sang for
Those hands that shattered the teeth and bones
Of every child who carried his name

I didn’t believe you when you said
You were running away to Miami
But by the time your birthday came
I gave up on waiting for your return
On the day you would have turned 12
I picked as many yellow weeds
And laid them on the hammock
Beneath it were the 6 rocks
You spent months trying to break open
Hoping to find jewels you would give
To the mothers we never met
I cried for the first time that night
Salty drops falling into one of my father’s beers
That sour taste i never learned to like,
Made more bitter with the ache of the heart
I pretended wasn’t broken

There were no stars out when I wrote these words
No soft winds, no prospect of hope in the light of a passing firefly
Just the ugly backyard where the soles of our feet stood side by side
As friends with the same dreams
The old man swears in the patch of dry weeds that has grown in the soil
Since we last stood there
Are two brothers sleeping in a garden of diamonds

Brown men in indigo dresses
Race camels and dream of rain
Hungry for stew
Hungry for women
But recite verses from their book
As they bend, as they spring
Legs flailing high and skinny
Brown matchsticks, Brown flames

Three camels lie side-by-side
Reigns pulled over foaming green mouths
Bellies burning on that beige blanket of the desert
Ablaze under a swollen sun

Brown men train on sand
Hot grains setting sparks on bare feet
Men traipse over three indifferent camels
Those speechless animals
Hungry for food
Hungry for females

Some men make it
Brag of strong legs leaping over giants
Beating the biggest beasts under the heaviest suns
They toast to cool water and fat goats
Praise be to Allah
Say even the ones who fell
And let a lying camel
Make fools of men

Heavy queen in polyester robes
Singing Aida or “I need ya”
An Impromptu recital from the balcony
A thick silver hairspray can her gilded microphone
A sullen garter her crown
Aluminum wrappers taken
From the tops of purple wines
Twisted into precious rings
A pair of bejeweled slippers
From the street market downtown
Holes where her calloused toes
Peek with chipped polish
A poor kind of beauty
When she bows for her audience
A single eyed pigeon sitting on her terrace
With nowhere to fly

in a dirty mirror the old man
looks for a trace  of the little boy inside
he wonders if feelings had a face
would it look as bad
as the one looking back at him
no, he thinks, it would be young,
naive, blemished,
but still new.
he would like to meet that little boy
with a face that doesn’t hang
with a dog’s droopy jawl,
a seafarer’s complexion painted
on his cheeks.
the boy: always learning, but not necessarily
getting better.
the old man doesn’t see
the little boy looking back
through yellow eyes
and white eyebrows
and years that have grown
into frowning wrinkles on his forehead and his eyes
saying:
‘Old Man, gravity made your skin sag
looking sad
but I shaded your view in dubious colors
let you believe that the curtians behinds these eyes
held a playground that time did not touch
where hurt was an abstract, no fact
I kept you from seeing that old man
captive in the arms of a young boy
wrapped in calloused old skin.
remember, when you don’t recognize
the soft belly and the arthritic hands,
that your skin is the dam
that kept your body from spilling
six decades of hope from washing up
on the streets of New York
where you sleep.”