Poems

A Collective Rebirth of Something:

Quirihue: Next to your epicenter

Somewhere out here

in sabulous glow

is the raw rust of a soupcan 

and us in milky sunlight,

stomped onto by heavens

twisted and dented

beneath the concrete,

clay 
and orange flowers.

Forgotten, no,

but left alone

in plain sight

in rainy daylight

(music comes from above and beneath tin rooves).

Oh, to say: we are a scab in a valley

that cannot scar;

we will wait

like wet wood 

in a hot stove.
It is neither fire nor blood that brings us together.

A broken wall (like a painting ripped in two)

leads to nothing

kicked over

onto muddy streets.
And the mud--

the mud is a distant relative 
of black sand 

spit onto a black shoreline

just beyond these mountaintops
(Is each speck a skeleton or a timeline?)--

That's where it all started.

Cato:

This is a night
black as your pupils.
 there are quiet sounds of sheep 
   imbibing fog
in the wet field from which I stand
in two-day old flannel socks
and wet jeans
even older.
The apex of sky
to the horizon
peppered (completely) with stars,
shiney grains of salt--
colors unnameable
except for camera-flash white
like your pupils
spilled across black table cloth
rippling outward and flickering
all the way to the walls of the universe
where an old man sits on an empty paint can
behind a change tray
saying
"you cant go no further.¨

Chillán: likePanic 

I can hear 
horse hooves and car engines
in the same breadth.

A spiderweb

a kaleidoscope of dewdrops

hangs delicately

on the corner of a woodshed

with old wooden debris stacked inside,

remnants of foreign memories before the teramoto.

This sunlight makes me feel 
like the world is stuck inside a blank television

set on low volume,

the sky a screen laminated with old 
papaya marmalade

spread as thin as film

a través del sky.

Am I the only one    who speaks jargon

in this sea of jargon?

I cannot ask

  anyone

why there are always hummingbirds fluttering

  sobre-nuestros heads.

(And) Finding the right word, 

the right shade of meaning
out here

is like searching for Pinocchio in a forest 
fire.

Riot: Santiago

And the thick of smog

will rise and fall

onto us all

and stray, stray dogs

drink from puddles.

They have two-

colored eyes

and blink like streetlights

in blue

in blue and black

and double.

I wonder what it must taste

like, that cold

cobblestone

in the dark,

and what they must wonder

when a gust of trash 
rises like a ghost

and dances like most
homeless in the park,

'o, tumbleweed

of the ciudad'
pardon me oh my and my ways

tear gas

fills the lungs 

and clears the streets
cien fuegos en

las calles.

Caña:

That old taste

of the night before

that old taste

a cough

and a hint 

of melancholy

like a little black seed from the guts 
of a kiwi

floating

inside a hallowed watermelon

inside a blank 

empty room,

and I think to myself

I hate the word

melancholy

because we have given life to it
by giving it a name--
I can feel it

all the way 
from here.

Upside Down:

I´ll wait for you
upside down
in reverse
walking backwards into an old season
that is hard to remember
and even harder to forget.
I´ll wait for you upside down
trying
not to fall off
the edge of it all
riding a brittle gravity
wondering if stars are flameproof origami paper
or ten thousand feet below
 you and me
 and the oceans.
I´ll wait for you in mineshafts
and I will paint the walls, the copper
celeste
like a sky over a still desert.
I´ll wait for you
upside down--
it's how I am.
I´ll wait for you
like how at the end of the boardwalk
my teenage self waits
like how the source of a river
never sees its creation.
I´ll wait for you
still as the center ring of a redwood
like the walls of a circle
and I will wait.

Infinity Exercise on a Bus

I have many questions
cascading, grating
inundating
and/or and both
relating
to nothing,
like how in the inside of a quark
inside an atom
there exists a universe
with even more impossible answers
I cannot even invent.
What is outside the universe
outside the atom
and where do I fit into the cycle?
How much is infinity?
Where does it all go
the colors
and the lights
and the numbers
containing infinity
infinities
(and why does that not scare me)?


Is it inside us all
that moment
we breach infinity,
as in that one ephemeral nano of a nanosecond
you become what we call "alive"
ensues,
and you are now alive
with nothing
but the care of a brand new mother
who has long since forgotten
what is freshest in the mind of the brand new you,
that place you came from
that "never or forever or whatthefuckever place" you just came from
--what was it like?  
was it nothing? 
is it all really nothing?

you stepped through the wall
now tell me.





Green Ink

If I had green ink
I´d go dancing with your brain waves
like van Gogh with green,
in greens
you can taste
and hear with the hairs 
on the back of your neck.

If I had green ink

I would replace my veins
and you and yours.
We would not forget to let go.
     Please, you, 

color my voice

with the sounds and vibrations of 

greenosyllabic reverie.
Ask me to sing 
falsetto
in the middle of Iowa.

Imagine green lightning
striking you
and somehow swallowing you whole.

See Below:

There are not enough words
in this language
and in every form of thought,
there are not enough thoughts in a language
to describe how I feel
so I say things
like:

See Above

august:

chalky charcoal chestnut eyeholes

well you wear me out

silver dollarshine.

i lick your collarbone 
clean with giant x's on my eyes

thinking about sun
flowerseeds

so salty like stubble on your kneecaps.

i heard that static 
is the same   same

sound as the glimmer of diamonds

inside prisms

on sunlit mirrors

engrained in each diaphanous layer of glass

that is the windowpane

above your mother's kitchen sink,

cracked and cracked open,

a sibilant gust surrounds my two hands

over your lower back

between the swaying denim

curtains

and the static (silence)

of a forgotten afternoon.

Rhyming on a MicroBus (Incomplete):

'If I make them all deaf will I finally get some sleep?

If I walk with a limp will your step feel incomplete'

Is he who survives last, he who tries the hardest?

Daylight's as good to me as it is a graffiti artist

Time's as good to me as a watch that never started

Like that void of nothing the thick walls an atom's guarding

Half-hearted

I half-wish to be

a cosmic mystery,

but the other half I guess means piss to me

much like how half the truth is the whole of history.

Chile

They say that Chile can be found at the end of the world.

as if one day, there was a surplus 
of geographical anomalies, and 
someone somewhere smooshed all those leftover

volcanoes

and rivers

and mountains

and tree trunks

into a slender strip

of green

as bright as the ink that dripped from Neruda

or the center of it's people's eyeballs,

the color in which they blink

dense

as a single grain of sand

from the desert resting on top

like a shiny bald spot.

I will assume the contrary,

that this is where it all begins,

as if one day someone was too eager

to make this world special.



EDIT: Melodrama beneath

Poetry, pt. II:

Poetry is a face that is hard to fathom.

It is the space in between each atom

innate like rhythm

hate and wisdom

given

at the end of the line

of distance and time

and the feeling you get when you're losing your mind.

Poetry is a quiet reminder 
of loneliness 
just when you think you understand yourself

and the the the relief
you feel from someone 
else's death 
that you are unsure was not yours. 

Poetry is everything you have ever forgotten 
combined

like the names of constellations and dinosaurs 
and what they were before they had names
(What did you do yesterday morning?)

Poetry cannot be

contrived into a rhyme

Go and see, bumblebees,

there is no proper time:

you mustn't forget

that silhouettes
let blood and pirouette
but are always flat to the naked
eye. 

Poetry is 
your neighbor's mail

written in braille

and the way an orange peel

feels

beneath your fingernails.

Poetry:

is not dead, you are.

Poetry is the ember of burnt wood

you pour water on

before you fall asleep 

to nothing

in everything

that you cannot see

because it is all put in front of you

wherever the strings may take you.

You don't even hear them laughing

just beyond the diorama 
in which you clunk and clod.

You don't even realize

marionette 

is a beautiful word.

And you are a beautiful word

with ugly nails as joints

and splinters for teeth.

Poetry 

is not dead, you are.

Poetry is the ember of burnt thoughts

you pour water on before you fall

asleep.

Poetry is not dead, because it is never
finished.

Crappy Untitled Poem:

My head

(in case you

need me)

will be in cumulus

looking down at powerlines and rooftops

before the ruin 

and the ivy will one day crack the mortar

between the cinderblocks and window frames

one days this city will resemble

a forgotten patch 
of rotten pumpkins.

My eyeballs are comprised

of molecules

and everywhere

I see the molecules,

all the molecules,

in each grain of sand

of the hourglass,

in the metaphors,

the mountains

and the ghosts of every drowned sailor

calling out the name 

of someone else's

ghost.