Las ordenes contribuyen al orden
gramático. La radio distribuyó las
medidas del radio del círculo. Dame una
orden y yo te doy el radio. No la radio.
Ya me acordé. Es que la radio es un
acortamiento de difusora o difusión.
Y el radio es que antes tenía un receptor
que venía después y por eso el artículo.
El orden es masculino pero la orden
es femenina. El género gramático
no tiene nada que ver con el género sexual.
Hay un orden en el género más allá
de los genitales. Y eso me lo aprendí
con la ayuda de la Real Academía
y te lo pongo todo en este fracasado poema.

Rabid mockingbirds dive-bombing
into empty schoolyards and mechanic shops,
flying low through canyons of Chinese food and tortillas,
these rapid streaks of brown darting
around Friday dusk-ridden bodies and a man
on the sidewalk sweating soaked in a T-shirt
donated from the First Baptist Church.
Or are they bats pining for the sustaining bite
searching the remains of the stands and garbage
for something worth saving,
using their radar to hone in on the facts.
Or are they angered doves alighting from one roof
to another in the night mistaken for sinister
things when everywhere there is dancing music and
a tiny girl getting out of a maroon minivan in a pink skirt
saying bye to the driver, lunging forward toward the bright lights.
Passing through half streaks of half evening light,
I’m not sure I think I hear one yell:
You there, go home.

Everything around us is collapsing and here we are stuck on this island. Perhaps if we stopped talking to each other we would have fewer calamities. Perhaps there is a future in our collapse.

I am more incapable than the most incapable, unable to turn my head so that my ear can hear what my mouth is saying. No power to turn and listen and when I do or if I try inevitably this will not work out.

Flitting from one sedative to the next upper, the combination is perfect, it leaves the mind almost normal. A perfect balance this in-between state, this normality we can’t quite reach anymore.

Our conflict was a conflict written in history already, built into synapses and made of rage. These words I write are loaded with the force of what has already happened. Disabled syllables incapable of openness.

The priest taught me if someone was angry with me than I had done something wrong. Taught me to do everything I could to not allow that kind of conflict, to be meek and doubtful and also seething with rage all at the same impossible time.

If you would only stop crying and if you would only hold back, I could tell you that everything I do and everything I say is controlled by this foreign god, this demon who has stolen my body and will not give it back. I am still accountable.

When I wandered into this relationship, I was struck by the light of the afternoon, the way even gray highway overpasses seemed to shimmer and bloom at your side. Now I realize I had sucked all your energy into my glimmering. I stole it.

        The girl with a headband holding back her well-coiffed locks was screaming her way through a conversation at the other table, ruling over her family in the way pretty girls can rule over whole groups. With almost ten people at the table, it was a wonder she was the only one who seemed to be talking. A loud, nasal voice rising up over the meek voices of her grandmother, elderly aunts and assorted children and twenty-somethings. She was giving a long speech on the nature of love and the difficulty of betrayal. Seated a few tables away from her at the pozolería, I could make out little swatches of conversation, small bits that floated over from the table. Suddenly, one phrase stopped me, broke me into laughter, hunched me over as a I tried to squelch my laughter:
        “En el amor, no hay número.”
        Don’t worry, I don’t understand what it means either.

Español: Alguién me preguntó si voy a escribir textos en español. Les dije que sí.

Afrikaans: Lemand het my gevra of ek gaan skryf tekste in Spaans. Ek het gesê ja.

Haitian Kreyol: Yon moun mande m si m pral ekri tèks nan panyòl. Mwen te di wi.

Filipino: Isang tao asked ako kung ako ay isulat ang teksto sa Espanyol. I said yes.

Albanian: Dikush më pyeti nëse unë shkruaj tekstin në spanjisht. I tha po.

Vietnamese: Có người đã hỏi tôi nếu tôi viết văn bản trong tiếng Tây Ban Nha. Tôi nói có.

French: Quelqu'un m'a demandé si je écrire un texte en espagnol. J'ai dit oui.

English: Someone asked me if I write a text in Spanish. I said yes.

The heart
he was putting
on his voice
got my attention.

A sedentary person cannot judge a traveler, or at least, if they did try, they would end up judging the voyager the wrong way, because they could never conceive of happiness except in the form of a return. A rooted person is always heading back to the place where they started. This person’s trips are always circular.

Endnote: Is a sedentary person the same as a domestic person or a homebody or a rooted person? Are these synonyms? Can I force them to be synonyms? How about the use of they as a non-gendered singular pronoun? Could I get a ruling on that grammer there? I need an outside opinion. Is a voyager the same as a traveler? Are these two conceptual people really opposites? Back to the couch. Or the airplane?

Today there was a sick girl rushing out the door who needed help running errands that she had no time or energy to do alone.

Today the man who lives in the house at the corner of the alley and the street was looking up for a long time at the red expanse of the wall of his home, as if there were something there to be seen.

Today a two-block section of the street was closed because of repaving.

Today a new money-changing office on the block added an electronic sign that flashes out the exchange rates.

Today there was a man who sat in front of the convenience store with his sunglasses on as he mean-mugged the passers-by.

Today there was a woman who left cheap gum on the small ledge between the car window and the car door beneath it.

Today the cable company’s entire system for receiving payments crashed all over the city, forcing the women who work there to document everything on carbon copy receipts.

Today there was a man arguing with the man making him his ceviche, something about the number of them or the price.

Today there was a woman who walked up behind the argumentative man, as if spying on him, like she wanted to intercede.

Today there was a dog with fleas insistently scratching on the screen door trying to get an invitation to enter.

Today there was a man in the street yelling, “Rudo.”

Today a repairman came to the three-story house next door where the strange white men live and called out, “Buenas tardes,” many a time as he knocked his screwdriver repetitively against the wooden gate.

Today there was a low-hum of a kind of drill in the distance, like a dentist drill but so much bigger and louder, filling the whole neighborhood with its squeal.

In general, nothing happens in contemporary life. If there is news, it appears in a virtual way on television or on the Internet. This news is assimilated quickly and immediately loses its newness. There is almost no possibility for surprise, since surprise has always already fallen back into the just-passed past.

Summer

(by Lester Robles O'Connor for JP)

Hours wasted then re-
gained through
tracing and re-
tracing.




(Since I appropriated the poem, it counts as my text for the day. )

There was once a boy who, during his first year in the virtual world, decided not to announce the date of his birthday. He thought it was fake and flimsy and not at all advisable. He felt like the brief moments of these wishes in this strange, un-real world were too ephemeral, that they passed too quickly by, and he questioned the reality of these waves of greetings. He thought and thought and thought and berated the very idea in his head, the emotion and excitement that it would provoke, lamenting the hollowness of it all. When the day of his birthday came that year, there were no phone calls and no one knocked on his door to give him a sweetbread or a can of beans. Not one present arrived. Not even an email made its way across the ocean or from the other side of the country or the city or the street he lived on. The only person to remember was his grandmother who weakly congratulated him, sticking her head through the boy’s doorway after he’d already tucked himself into bed. His inattentive mother called the following day, scolding him for not posting the date in the virtual world. She coughed out a kind of scratchy congratulations, which sounded more like a hack in the throat. His brother forgot too and called a week later with the same reproaches and then had his son sing the traditional birthday song over the speakerphone. In years past, his family and some friends had always remembered, but not with the advent of the new virtual world; it seemed everybody had stopped keeping track of birthdays. Everyone had ceded control to some strange virtual birthday god who would keep track of them himself and inform everyone when it was time to send funny comments and wisecracks on the occasions of friends’ births. As if now, with everyone plugged into the virtual world, his birthday had simply, disastrously ceased to exist.

When the next year’s birthday rolled around, the boy’s entry into the virtual world was complete; in fact, the virtual world had come to take up as much time in his life as his real life, if not more. He would spend hours checking up on his virtual friends, long-lost friends, friends he’d met briefly or spontaneously in some playground or encounter or street corner. So that year, he decided to put his birthday into the virtual world so that the whole wide net of friends would see it there and he would see what happened. The congratulations began to trickle in a few days early, people who were obviously getting it out of the way beforehand just in case they forgot. Then at 12am on the day of his birthday, he was at a festival in the street alone and amazingly a flock of acquaintances and semi-friends all knew about his birthday. They came up with kisses and drinks and good wishes and he wondered how everyone knew and then he remembered that they had found out in the virtual world. The flood of emails began at 12am as the virtual birthday cards and virtual birthday cakes and virtual birthday wishes piled up in astounding wave after wave after wave. Phone calls poured in from across oceans and wide expanses. Midday the next morning, a girl showed up on his porch with a sweetbread. Around noon, another girl put a can of beans on his doorstep after he stepped out to the grocery to buy some fruit. His mother called and his brother called with his son, all on conference call, and they all sang him the traditional birthday song. He even had invitations to go out at night, run around the neighborhood with the cool kids from the virtual world. He said no though. That just wouldn’t feel right.

That night, alone, the boy thought about all this, thought about the virtual god who had made sure to inform everyone in an appropriate and timely way about the anniversary of his birth, thought about all the small notes and birthday wishes, thought about all the moments that all those people took to think of him and to wish him something, something however fleeting and small as a wish that his birthday be happy. The boy just thought and thought and thought. In the end, he thought and thought and smiled.

That night, very late, after he’d unplugged from the virtual world, he sat at his desk wondering what he should do now, feeling empty as he often did after unplugging his brain from the rushing tide of virtual stimuli. He heard the low buzz of the TV his grandmother was watching in the other room and got up to go see her. He told his grandmother everything that had happened and how different this year had been from the year before. Then he sat down on the couch and watched the TV. A few minutes later, his grandmother told him he’d done the right thing. She turned to him and, shutting off the TV and standing up, she wished him a happy birthday.

There was a lot to be afraid of

and then we went and made art.

There is so much to be afraid of

when we go and make art.

When we go and make art

There is so much to be afraid of

and then we went and made art.

There was a lot to be afraid of.

A candy wrapper fluttered across the yard. The girl watched it twist and pull in the wind, as if fighting back against the flow of air delivering it forward. Suddenly, it stuck on a blade of grass. Or, I could say, on the prick of a cactus in the yard, speared by the wind onto the needle’s point. First, the girl watched it and decided this was trash. The wrapper, one side bright colored and wax-papered on the other, flittered in the wind, splayed across the needle, spoiling the paddle-shaped cactus, spoiling the yard. Then the girl was moved, she felt a pang of something in her insides. The trash had a particular value to it. The value of any particle. That the way she’d rejected the trash as just that, trash, was cruel and rash. The wrapper was in fact pierced through the heart, bored through by this unwelcome, unexpected invasion. A wrapper on the side of the yard, away from the noise of the street, protected and yet penetrated through its center. The girl focused on this piece of trash, its intrinsic specialness. Its value found in its unremarkableness. Unremarkable being the clunkiest, most intrusive word possible for saying simple. Simple. The girl was alone on the porch, rubbing the spaces between her toes to dry out the sweat. As the wind picked up, it tore the wrapper from its perch and tumbled it on its way, lifting and dropping in the ever-faster wind. The girl turned away from the wrapper, looked down at the reddish crook of her toes. I have an urge now to send a car barreling across the lawn leveling it all in one fell swoop. A creeping, nagging desire to blanket the lawn, the garden, the porch, the house in a blanket of ash from the refinery next door. Tell me not to do that, please.

My grandmother is dead. The house has been sold. Her table is in my eating area. Her santos have been divided up among the children, remnants in various houses on various shelves. The snails from the backyard are still crawling there. The pebbly driveway as well has held firm. The edging on her lawn has been kept steep and sturdy by the new landscaping crew hired to maintain it. I drive by there sometimes now. Just drive by and look at the outside of the red brick. The tallness of its two stories. I’m told the inside has been completely remodeled. I wouldn’t want to see it. I see pictures of myself as a baby crawling on the clean, cool linoleum floor. It looks like summer, the back kitchen door is propped open in the backyard with a brick. Where is that brick now? It was one of the same bricks used in the backyard on the wavy, uneven patio where we would hunt for those snails. Crawling around on our knees on the moist, mossy bricks hunting for snails and rolie-polies. We’d take salt and shrivel up the snails, imagine them crying out for mercy. The double garage in the back with a small room off to the side for a servant to stay in. My grandmother’s maid would stay there. A tree once fell on the garage. I wonder if Pearlie B was there when it fell. There are pictures of my brother and I with my cousins in the backyard of the house. We are wearing tight, flowery short shorts and wide neck shirts with dainty, too-big cardigans. My mother was going through a phase during which she’d decided to sew our clothes. I have huge John Lennon glasses on. Glasses I lied about my vision to get. I wanted glasses. My eyesight deteriorated and soon I did need them in fact not just in fiction. The windows in the dining room shined they were so clean. My father’s back went out once while we were staying at the house. I remember him screaming as my mother lead him into the bathroom she had used as a child. The books in the study were on built-in shelves and went from mid-level to the ceiling. Below it were cabinets. The attic was dusty and full of mystery, a narrow staircase leading up to it, claustrophobia-inducing smallness opening up at the top into the wonder of this musty space lost the rest of the world. I sat in the study with my grandparents and watched the news with them, the national news with Dan Rather and Robert Macneil. I have the couch that was in my grandfather’s study. It has a spot on one sidearm where the upholstery was almost completely worn through. He would sit on that side and read and he must have grasped that spot and rubbed it quite a bit. The bathroom was full of yellow and orange flowered wallpaper, the glossy, textured kind. The smell of the house is impossible to forget and yet I constantly forget it until, like happened a few years ago, I went over to a friend’s house, a similar home from the same era in Houston, and remarkably the bathroom smelled exactly the same. I sat in the bathroom for a long time and just inhaled, letting in all of the remembrances.

This is where my mind is my mind is crazy all these people around me are my mind is like this like from one thing to another like I can’t get out of it can’t feel any bit of it of what is really going on sometimes I get these spurts of attention like these sudden bolts of suddenly the energy aligns how do i say this like it all makes sense you over there me over here we are all working together on so many things so many all of a sudden things and you in your corner and me in mine suddenly the I that rules my brain it breaks out and I feel like I am suddenly with you somewhere where you are making things out of things or making things out of words or making words out of things and words words words.