It is the iron and blood offered on blue blackflower stems or rusting hulks of palm tree decay,
the children who rage and perish in green cellblock
isolation, medicated under guard and lock and key,
a street-bred godson lost in the slow suspicion that his
chameleon gifts are unwelcome and misunderstood,
the propaganda that paralyzes thought and dissent with
threat and fear amplified on screens and speakers
bought and paid for with clueless taxpayer complicity.
It is the bitter sound of homelessness on worn sneaker
soles under the anonymous face of addiction and exile,
the Iraq war veteran with a gun to his head as he recalls
atrocity in a desert he should never have known,
his grandfather who cries silently at dawn for lost loves
and the borders like walls and turrets that drove them away,
the bent and fractured poet who twists with insomnia
and recalls every unfinished dream like the color of dread,
his mother with a blooming flower of death in her liver,
as if to say innocence can only be rewarded with fire.
It is the unforgotten beloved he could not regain,
the stainless steel memory of refrigerated nausea
against the gray-smoke haze of anguish or remorse
or the sound of a blackboard under his fingernails
until the blistering exhaustion encircles his neck
and rakes all of his pores along barbed-wire truth
like the time he woke up on the curb, his face tired
and the spring a season of despair longing for hope.
El Sereno
November, 2007
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