Did you hear?

Did you hear?

Today they canceled science and history

and math

and filled the slots with silly time.

It was declared
that serious persons must commit

one gaff

or fall

or laugh

or write the word booger

one-hundred times.

It’s just that sort of day,

ovely,

dovel
lovely is what it is.

Did you see the news?

They found a WWII submarine

off the coast of Carolina.

A relic of a serious time--

but wouldn’t you believe it,

the crew was fine!

They were drunk actually

and the spectacled scientists felt silly
from their tentacled craft
as the submariner and his men
sauntered all over
the ocean floor.

I'm sure you've felt it before.

People always saying

there's something coming;

they feel the slow strings

quickening, 
tightening.

But assholes always get it wrong, don't they?

Didn’t you hear?

Today they canceled science and history

and math
and filled the slots with silly time.

Write the word booger one-hundred times

laugh

or make a gaff 

or if deep down 
you're serious like me

try to fall

in love.

Third World Explanation

I can only explain the Third World like this: it’s like sleepaway summer camp. You sleep next to a fan. If you get sick, an adult who is not your parent takes you to the doctor. The roads are bumpy and unpaved. The cars are all old pickups that need paint jobs. Conditions alternate between dust and mud. The furniture is old and worn, even in places like insurance agencies or restaurants, and the padding will be popping out of the leather or there will be scratches or little drips of paint on it if it's wood. It's still comfortable, and functional, but it would never fly in the States. Someone would have said, “It’s time we got rid of that thing,” and that would be the end of that. New fuckin’ table. At summer camp everything and everyone looks a little grimy. But you get used to it, so much that when you leave the first thing you notice are the colors. There's such contrast between the white shirts and the red sweaters. Your eyes are adjusting. Then your mom says you need to take a shower before you go out to eat. You realize you're dirty as hell. Most people in the Third World are spared this rude realization because their camp session lasts forever.

We never had packs of wild dogs at summer camp though. One night around 2 a.m. I watched a street battle, a swirl of ribcages and muscle, in the cobblestone intersection below my balcony. I had a great view but I can’t say I enjoyed it much. When it was over, the one pack was charging up the hill, looking like a cavalry regiment after a successful raid, and the other gave a half-spirited pursuit before trickling back down the hill. One of their number, a thin and beautiful creature that looked like a wolf, was sitting like a sphinx in the middle of the road. His back leg stuck out oddly behind it and it from where I stood it looked like a ripped pillow. He made no noise but beat his tail and looked at the other dogs plaintively. They gathered around him and licked his face and whined after they’d smelled the oddly-bent leg. I returned an hour later to smoke a cigarette and the dog was alone and looking alert, listening to the sounds of the empty street. It was a starry clear night and he looked like a castaway. I don’t know what happened to him and I can’t think of a better outcome than not knowing. Maybe it’s the way dogs grin even when they’re hurt or dying that makes their plights such a concern to people. Of course many people don’t care, and anyhow it's not an actual grin. 

It's No Joke Being Broke

A few months ago I came to spend a few days in Tela, a city on the north coast of Honduras, before flying out of nearby San Pedro Sula. I’d paid half of all the money I had for one night in a hotel, and I was getting screwed. I sat in my room covered in sweat with a remote control to a dead TV. The fan wouldn’t spin, wouldn’t oscillate, and my lips were bleeding from eating unripe mangoes. The skin of an unripe mango is full of urushiol, the same kind of oil that makes poison ivy poisonous.

I went to take a shower. The towel was on the rack by the sink and had the words Hotel La Hacienda written on it in black permanent marker. There was no curtain or shower-head, just a tube sticking out of the wall. I turned the nozzle, half expecting no water to come out, and none did. I smelled smoke, a sort of burning plastic smell, and turned to see that the fan was on fire. I’d left it on and the internal gears were grinding themselves away.

In the morning my stomach was rumbling like crazy. I went down to the restaurant, which was on the second floor, to get the free breakfast. It was early and the room was dark and out the large rectangular window on the far side of the room I could see the main square and beyond it the grayish-blue line of the ocean. I felt better. The woman came out and I told her I wanted coffee. She pointed to the food on the counter. There was cereal and oatmeal. I emptied a bag of oatmeal into a plastic bowl and added some hot water. They were decent but not at all the way I remembered them. Halfway through the bowl I saw that I was eating maggots, little larvae squirming in the bowl. I finished the coffee and headed to the beach.

There was a bridge over a small river that emptied into a lagoon. Water from the lagoon flowed across the flat sand and met the onrushing water from the ocean and the currents made fantastic patterns. Palm trees lined the beach in neat rows and every so often there was a large blue garbage can next to one of them. A large ship loomed close to shore. It revved its engine and black smoke came out of it. I thought it was searching for something or practicing staying in one place because it did not leave an area within four bright orange buoys. The beach was empty but I still buried my wallet in the sand before getting in the water. There was nothing in my stomach but coffee and a few maggots. In the water I bobbed like an empty pop can. The ocean felt like forgotten tea.

Fish Girl

There was a fish on the sidewalk. 

“Hey!  Hey!  I like your sunglasses,” she said.

 She was flopping alongside of me.   

“You snuck up on me there.”

The sun slid a rainbow up to her pouting lips. 

“What’s your name?”

A heave:  “Mary.”

Mary was covered in flies.

“Where are you going Mary?”

“This way.” 

“Well come on then.”

“Where are you from?” I asked.

 “Tennessee.  Thirty miles south of Chattanooga.”           

“So that’s eastern Tennessee.” 

She stopped and looked very impressed.

“Baby,” she said.

I thought I saw a smile, the rainbows around her gills switching poles.

 “Well, I live right up here by Morocco Street. Do you know where that is?”

“I do. I’m staying there with some friends.”

“What a coincidence. What are you doing in town?”

“I just got a job at Babes’ Cabaret.”

“So you’re going to be a stripper?”

“I start tomorrow night. You should be my # 1.”

“OK,” I said. “Take me home with you?”

“Sure thing,” she said. “Just pick me up.”

I put my hand around her

and she felt like old sandwich meat.

"Hm, maybe if I..."

Then I caught my finger on a spine.
"Ouch!"

"Sorry." 

I tried my hand like a spatula

and one of her scales peeled off into my hand.

She was stuck to the pavement.

I didn’t want to go home with her anymore.

“Just wondering," she asked,
"do you have water or anything at your house?”

I looked down the street for the bus.

“Uhm. What they don’t have a fish bowl where you live? Or at least a cup of water?”

“No, they just say they love me.”

“Well that’s something. Hey, you want some beer?”  

I had a half a can of beer

and I tilted it toward the button eye

 and the sinewy mouth, which snapped open.

“That was good,” she said. “Hey, wait! Where are you going?”

“Five blocks this way, and two that way.”

“Oh, bye,” she said and waved her fin

sadly like a fan.

I put my hands on my hips
and turned toward the street.

The light was baking the shade,

just beating it up.

I saw legs moving from the bottoms of trellised porches.

The cats were starting to move.

“Good luck Mary,” I said. 

Cabbies

Two white gulls appear from the perfect blue and startle the water. It is 8:00 a.m., the start of a new day. The cab drivers’ voices rise and fall in time. They come to this parking lot every morning. There is a Dunkin Donuts, which opens early, and Value Pricing, an Arab store that sells dates, olives, and tea. On a good day there are twenty of them, with ten drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, watching the sun rise over the canal from foldout chairs around an ornate rug that’s stored in Horiya’s trunk. Four other men sit cross-legged on stools. The older men wear well-ironed gray trousers and pastel shirts that puff nicely near the waist. One has a tweed jacket neatly folded over one knee. They have striking mustaches and black hair that’s combed over dignified patches bare scalp. The others recline in their cars and close their eyes and do not talk except out their windows. They come to see men that look like their grandfathers talk to men that look like their fathers, letting the language drift in the open window...

“He received the...ah... Peace Prize in 1964 to make the world a better place. Then there was 1967, and ah...”

“—Whole new ball game?”

“Right,” the first one says. “Exactly.”

There’s a rumble in the distance that scares away the gulls. (What does Horiya, whose father’s business was destroyed three times by airstrikes, hear in the summer when the sky is dark and booming with rain?)

“I could drive cab for 30 years with no raise,” a young driver says. “Already I speak better English than Jerome, and he is the boss.”

“He speaks black,” another says. “‘Yo Yo.’ Right?”

 “It’s an outrage.”

An older man with the folded tweed jacket raises his hand. “Outrage?” he says. “You not realize how bad it could be.” “Look where we are. The air is good. You are not questioned by the guards. You may go anywhere you like. It is a blessing.” His palm is flat, held from a bent elbow, like a frozen snake ready to strike.

 “Yes, but we still must work,” – the other old man adds– “very hard.” The last two words carry the full weight of his breath, as if it were too early for them to be spoken, and they remind the men to be a little afraid. Two men roll up Horiya’s rug and carry it to his trunk. They finish their coffee, crush half-smoked cigarettes on the pavement, start their engines and drive away. Then the parking lot is empty. They hear it on their radios. The first plane hits at 8:14. The second at 8:22. If you hadn’t been there an hour before, you’d never know they were there. 

Never Write Poems About Dreams

In college someone told me,

Never write poems about dreams.

It's an excess,

a willful muddling of meaning,

a lack of conviction disguised as attitude.

I can see the logic in this,

but god damn.

I'm not particularly worried

about how I write a fucking poem,

I told the guy,

who was my college professor.

He had a fedora, a witty t-shirt,

thick-rimmed glasses, a mustache,

and he was wearing a scarf in New Orleans.

That's a lack of conviction.

Candidate

I was at a gas station in Honduras

drinking coffee and reading

when I met the candidate.

There were three employees dressed in bright red vests.

One put the coffee in a Styrofoam cup.

Another fetched sugar packets

and a little red straw.

The last took a pile of napkins from the dispenser

and placed them neatly under the sugar packets.

I knew by his stature,

his perfect mustache, and cowboy hat

that he was someone important;

a wealthy rancher

or a member of the cartel.

He sat next to me and asked where I was from

and I told him, and he said he had family in Waukegan

and I told him what I knew of the place.

He said he'd lived in New Orleans

and then California,

where he’d picked artichokes with Cesar Chavez.

Knew him personally.

I nodded and noticed his face by my right elbow

on a stack of laminated flyers.

Mario Padilla, candidate for congress

running for the newly-formed leftist party, Libre.

Next to Mario is Libre's presidential candidate:

an attractive, dark woman

with thick black eyebrows named Xiomara Castro,

wife to former president Manuel Zelaya

who was ousted in a coup in 2009.

I told him I was a leftist too and then had nothing else to say,

so I motioned to the chaos of the street where the construction

of a four-lane road was underway.

“I heard it’s all for politics,” I said, baiting him. “They want it done by election time.”

“You see that?” he asked,

pointing to a boy sweeping dust from the street. “The poverty. It breaks my heart.”

Maybe a week later I heard an interesting story:

I was told Mario Padilla stole the gas station we'd been sitting in.

More precisely President Zelaya

had seized all the gas station in town

and given them to party supporters, like Mario.

Perhaps it's for good reason that people say

Libre is more of the same.

They had a shot at winning, but that was seven months ago.

In the mean time,

the new road was completed,

the Che Guevara memorial was demolished early on election day,

and Libre lost the election,

though their red flags hang from the tree stumps

and gutters in the poorer neighborhoods

where everyone with nothing to lose

somehow lost again.

The new president is conservative.

He promised: A Soldier on Every Corner

and now with the machine guns

there’s no fear of being robbed of your wallet,

there's just fear,

which is robbery of hope.

What it comes down to in Honduras is security

and that’s the way it is now: secure.

People with money like conservative politicians

because they buttress inequality,

giving you the choice between warm shit

or cold shit,

corruption or martial law,

poverty or crime.

Sooner or later we’ll say enough is enough.

There is hope, I know it,

because inequality is not a natural state;

it takes energy.

Imagine a hand shaking a snow globe

or sand agitated in water.

Gravity takes over

sooner or later.

Trivia

I found myself playing trivia with a cute girl at the elbow of the bar. We hadn’t signed up to play, so we just called out the answers.

“Which John Steinbeck novel revolves around the characters Lenny and George?”

“Of Mice and Men!” we said.

“Which American novelist wrote the Rabbit tetralogy?”

“John Updike!” we cried.

We couldn’t miss. We were getting some good glares from the tables behind us. The host, a man-child who was halfway through his third Dr. Pepper, sat at a foldout table with a microphone and a laptop. He seemed very content and I didn’t see him pull his eyes away from the screen once.

“Who in the 1940s invented the Aqua-Lung?” he asked.

“Jacques Cousteau,” I said, “that one was easy.”

“And Emile Gagnan,” she added. I looked at her. She was wearing a black and white dress with diagonal stripes that turned horizontal below her chest.

The bartender walked over to our corner. “If you two keep calling out the answers you’re going to have to leave.”

“Give me two PBRs.”

“I’m serious, one more time and you’re out.”

“Sure.” I gave him a five and put a dollar on the bar for tip. The host was feverishly scoring the previous round. I turned to my teammate.

“I was under the impression that it was just Cousteau.”

“They were co-inventors: Cousteau was the rockstar, Gagnan was the engineer.”

“I didn’t think anybody spent more time on Wikipedia than me, except maybe the host.”

“Well that’s depressing.”

“I like it. What’s your name?”

“It’s a normal name,” she said, “It’s not interesting. What about yours?”

“My last name looks French, but it’s not. People say it’s difficult to pronounce.”

“I’m jealous.”

“You shouldn’t be. I’m sure there’s an interesting story behind your name.”

She nodded, but seemed doubtful. The bartender brought the beers and I handed one to my teammate. She looked at me. She had big, dark eyes.

“Is there an interesting story behind your last name?” she asked.

“I’ve heard two. The first, which I heard from my uncles as a child, is kind of mysterious and romantic, but it hasn’t been substantiated by the internet. They said it meant People of the snow. I wish it were true. People of the snow. Isn’t that nice? The second story is that it’s a Gaelic translation of the Germanic name Siegfried, which means Victory. You know like the Nazis, ‘Seig Heil!’”

“My first name is Spanish for pillar.”

“Like a pole?”

“Like a support beam.”

I didn’t hear the next question of the next round, but apparently she did.

“Cheese!” she yelled, and there were some groans from the tables behind us. The host put his Dr. Pepper down loudly on the table. The bartender stood up from taking an order down the bar and pointed at us. “That’s it you two, out!”

We walked out to the street and I saw lights above the houses. It looked like a stadium, but I guessed that it was a port on the river. We were close to the river, but you couldn’t see the lights during the day and you wouldn’t know.

“Where are you staying?” she asked.

“With some friends on the couch. You?”

“With my mom, but just for now.”

I took a step forward and brought my lips to hers, accidentally imagining her mother: a woman with the same face, hair, and dress, but with more makeup, black stockings, and a larger bust. I pulled back.

“You know,” I said, “you’re the best trivia player I’ve ever met.”

“I’m an insignificant-information specialist.”

I asked her what she wanted to do, and she took me by the hand and led me down a street where quaint little houses and banana trees stood over a sidewalk made of brick. There was a bike with thin tires and a large seat locked to a stop sign. She unlocked it and I told her to straddle the front tire and walk and then jump up on the handlebars when I started pedaling. I took care to avoid the parked cars. It was damp and dark and brisk with her good-smelling hair in my face. The world of drunk bicycling is a wonderful world. It has to be at least as good as drunk driving, and it’s probably better, because there is less guilt and less danger of anyone but yourself getting killed.

We rode our strange vehicle for two blocks, and then the pedaling became incrementally more difficult. The back wheel was under-inflated. I told her to hop off when I hit the brakes, and she pushed off and her legs cleared the front wheel. We walked onto a street with a boulevard and large houses with wide, deserted porches. There was a heightened perception and an intimacy and measuredness to time that we’d not felt on the bike. The streetlights illuminated the lower branches of huge oak trees and on the ground the moist-looking roots pushed the sidewalks up from the ground.

We found a dark place along the side of a house and we kissed and I turned her around and pulled up the back of her black and white dress. I liked what I saw, maybe as much as I’d ever liked anything else, but there was also an unexpected feeling of familiarity, a sudden sense that I was participating in some ubiquitous and ultimately banal enterprise. Of course, this did not stop me and I was glad to find that once again we were of the same mind. I probed her every centimeter, exploring with my hands, growing more depraved with every passing moment, as she ducked, spun, and fluttered, letting me know her body in segments, engaging with pieces rather than the whole. What we were doing was more like watching professional sports than making love and it took great focus and encouragement to achieve anything substantial, but I finally did.

I walked home and forgot about her that night. I don’t know when I first started thinking about her again, but a week later I was back for trivia night sitting at the elbow of the bar. I couldn’t remember her face, so I sat and listened for someone calling out the answers. There was a pretty girl next to me. We looked at each other, but she didn't have anything to say and neither did I. It went like that all night, these looks. Finally I leaned over. “Your name means pillar in Spanish," I said. "Pillar, like a pole.”

“Like a support beam.”

She looked at me, smiling very large, and I remembered her eyes. She was more dark and wonderful looking than anything I'd expected to see that night.

“There are two stories about your name,” she said. “One your uncles told you. It’s mysterious and romantic and it’s the one you’d like to believe, but the other story is true."

I was in love.

"Do you want a drink?"

"No."

"Me either."

“Then let’s go."

She was the best teammate I ever had and we never played trivia again.

I Get Lucky

We were listening to jazz on the patio of a bar in New Orleans.

It was a cool night and the band was passing around a solo.

The light was dim and everywhere there was a feeling of wellness

being edified by drinks.


My girl said she had to go to the bathroom

and when she'd stood up

and went

the guy at the next table

leaned over to me and said,

“Mmm mm Mm! I wouldn’t mind going home with that every night!"

He had cut-off jean shorts and insane blue eyes

that I followed across the patio

to a thin and beautiful woman holding her purse

winding through the tables

in a silky green dress:

my girl.


I leaned back in my seat

and remembered how it was to be driven mad

by the sight of women--

not love at first sight,

which implies a sort of serendipity,

but the indiscriminate sexual craving

that is like hunger

and has nothing at all to do with chance.


Looking at him,

I felt no fire. 


I’d hit the jackpot

and forgotten how it was to be alone,

forgotten the old way,

forgotten my people,

perhaps even become arrogant,

which is the greatest sin.

If he was loneliness come back to visit me

I owed him something more nuanced

than knocking his teeth out.

Anyways, it was only a matter of time

before I was back on his team.


“Sometimes I get lucky,” I offered and he nodded,

but he was thinking “Bullshit,”

and I thought he was probably right.


I listened to the music

and thought of how to explain this.  

The drummer had begun his solo. 

He stretched it out, improvising.

Across from me, the empty metal chair 

rattled from the bass.

And just when it seemed like noise, 

he stopped.

I’ve never been much of a gambler.

More often than not 

I put up more than I can afford to lose.

I never turn down a bet, especially when I’m hurting,

and I don’t care about the odds.

If that’s luck, then I’m lucky,

but I don’t think that’s it.

It’s recklessness,

and if you’re true to it

you better learn to enjoy the payouts.

So I bought us two drinks I couldn’t really afford 

and made his a double.

Robbing a Priest

The only thing Pablo could see were a pair of outstretched hands.

-Tell him to turn slowly, Concho said.

-He speaks Spanish.

-Turn.

The priest’s black garb rose and spread and fell and he turned. The lights of San Esteban were behind him and to Pablo he looked like a part of a starry sky with no stars. Concho motioned toward the priest with his lips, like a kiss in the air, and Pablo put the pistol into the waistline of his shorts. It had been tucked away there for hours while they waited, but now, in returning it, it felt very heavy and cold against his skin.

-Empty your pockets.

-Don’t turn around, Concho added.

-I don’t have much money, the priest said in English.

-Put what you have on the ground. Then walk to San Esteban.

-What did he say?

-You understand English, the priest said to Pablo. That’s good.

Concho took a step forward.

-What did he say?

Concho’s angular nose and feminine lips pointed at the back of the priest as he addressed him in a gentle voice.

-I am not as young as my friend, Father. Tell me what do you say to my friend?

The priest did not answer and Concho allowed the shotgun stock to fall from his shoulder into his hand.

-He was praying, Pablo said quickly. That we might not hurt him.
Concho nodded.

-Take thee home, Father.

Then the priest was down the hill and onto the road, passing through the shimmering leaves of the Munoz family banana plantation. Pablo did the math; in five minutes he would pass under the light of the farmacia. In ten minutes he would turn and begin the hill to San Esteban. In fifteen minutes he would walk past Pablo’s front door. He might look at it, or even knock on the door for help, but he would not see his house. Not in the way he should.

-What does Mayachusett mean? Concho asked. He was sifting through the wallet.

-It’s the name of a state.

-Yames Pahtreek Carney? Concho laughed. What does that mean?  

-His name. Let me see?

-Maybe I could sell it for something.

-It’s not a visa. It doesn’t do anything.

-Then you keep it.

Pablo handed Concho the pistol.

-I’m going home.

They walked down the road. At the farmacia Concho pulled a bill out of the wallet and held it up to the light.

-It’s a shame to think we stole from poor people, he said, but at least it was already stolen.

-It was your idea Concho.

-Possibly this is your mom’s lempira. You can return it to her.

He held out the bill. The road was empty and still. The scattered lights on the hills above San Esteban looked like stars or lamps on docked fishing boats.

-Oh, let up.

-Forget it. She’d only give it back to him. We’d have to keep it in a safe place. It wants to go back, but we mustn't let it.

-You’re crazy.

-Sure. So you should keep it. Or give it to your sister—no, I’ll give it to your sister.

-She’d ask you where you got it.

-I’ll say your mother gave it to me.

Pablo started into the tracks of the priest.

-See you later, Concho.

-Already?

-Because my mother and sister are waiting for me.

Concho mumbled something that Pablo did not hear. Then he called out.

-Pablo!

-What? What is it?

-Feliz año nuevo.

-Happy new year, Concho.

-Let’s split the money now.

-Tomorrow.

-Tomorrow then. Go make your resolutions.

Pablo reached the bend in the road and when he looked back toward Concho, he was under the light shaking his head and looking at his hands. Pablo let his eyes adjust and saw that he was really just counting the money, passing the bills from one hand to the other. Concho looked up, saw Pablo was watching, then turned and walked down the road to the orphanage.