Ditch waters shimmer
as the sun sizzles on highway workers
with their skin burned brown, they shed
their shirts and children scamper
from a yellow school bus.
My brother sees me waiting
and as the bus pulls away,
it spews clouds of gray smoke.
We walk along the ditch bank, and stop
to float cracked crusted beer bottles
in a game of battleship, using stones
as missiles to shoot our cannons, sinking
beery battleships, and as I sat
under a cottonwood, I knew each day
that I yearned for something,
to be a little boy, but I'm the oldest
and that wish never survived boyhood.
At the train yard I listen for the train, a distant
wail like an old woman crying.
As it pulled into the station yard, it hissed
like a snake, and a voice inside my head
called out, taunting me, tempting me to leave
and every day it became harder to ignore,
but I said to it under my breath
to go, please just go.
We left the train yard and came to our door
where inside a tempest raged,
and when I opened the door
I heard the ugly word "Mientes,"
screamed again and again,
until the word hit me too,
opening a gash over my eyes
filling them with acid.
I asked someone for the meaning of mientes,
and she asked me why,
has someone called you a liar?
I shook my head no
and hurried away because a snake
shedding its skin wants nothing
but to be alone in its changing,
so that when it emerges,
there is no trace left of the old skin
that made them ugly and small and afraid.
Blood sped from my her nose
and her eye was black and swollen
like the hole gathering in my heart,
a gash on her lips redder than her lipstick,
and the demons scurried.
I can't move, my dreams are sloughed off skins
of snakes baking in the sun,
and I can hear the old woman of the river
eating the hearts of children,
drinking their dreams like blood.
I found friends in the streets
in haunted territories where we played poker and pool
the chastised at a distance fascinated and fearful,
like rabbits from a coyote,
my brother by my side
as we learned the power of unity,
living our stories in the violence of our rage.
Her wounds healed and she never spoke of them
and I never asked,
and I could believe it never happened,
They never speak of when they were young,
except for the other day when she gazed
at an old wedding picture,
she beautiful and young in long black hair,
and he in skinny mustache,
white suit and work boots.
"My mom told him to change his shoes,
but he just laughed,"
"He's a good man," she said,
and I nodded yes,
I am still here though I could have escaped many times,
I look through the slits of my cell,
comfortable and familiar.
The blood of my hopes thick and crusted.
I remember when I reached the river
at the edge of the valley,
my power flickered in the wind
and threatened to go dark,
and I cupped my hands around the flame,
until it flickered and blazed.
A candle flickers now at my bedside,
illuminating the window where outside life
waxes on rosewood,
the world an altar with candy skulls,
time simmers in wasted nights,
and my dreams sleep.
I woke up this morning and bought a gun.
I slid open the clip and loaded one by one
until it clicked with an eerie finality,
and in its blue metal sheen,
I saw myself in the barrel,
told to go home though I was born here
long before Plymouth Rock.
I saw my uncle who lost his home
after he lost his leg in Iraq.
I saw my daughter
giving up her golden dreams
to work for the golden arches.
In the blue metal sheen, I saw my friends
who died young, addicted to hopelessness,
and the rage seethed like a slow boiling magma
just beneath the surface,
I clutched my magnum and readied to leap
into a simmering cauldron of hate.
But then at that instant, at that very instant,
like a cooling summer deluge over a raging fire,
my little grandson walked in, hand-in-hand
with his new little friend,
my grandson brown as the wheat chaff
and his friend white as the lilies of the field.
I saw that in his future, there was no need
for violence nor rage, and I put my own away.
prayed, and I hugged them both.
When they asked why I cried,
I told them those are not tears,
but only rain.
