I kept thinking of that woman named Rita, a Rarámuri Indian, charged with killing her husband in Chihuahua, Mexico. She fled and crossed the desert and was found years later in an alley in Kansas City rummaging in a dumpster for food. I carried her with me on every run. Her intelligence imbued me, shaped my hours, my mind filled with her figure walking in the desert, under the hot Sonoran sun. I tried to feel and sense what she might have felt and sensed as she trekked across the burning sands.
Once found, she was kept in an asylum for the mentally ill for years until one day a nurse, escorting a new doctor down the hallway, pointed to Rita in a cell and said the woman was insane, babbling in strange tongues, and no one knew who she was or where she came from. And because there was so little known about her, the hospital staff and authorities referred to her as Rita of the Sky. The visiting doctor touring the facility, however, hailed from the same region in Chihuahua, Mexico, and he cried out that it was no nonsensical babble but a language he was fluent in. Through this doctor’s efforts, it was discovered that Rita was not crazy and never had been.
After legal hearings with court-appointed lawyers petitioning in her behalf Rita was discharged. She was awarded a million dollars in damages but the lawyers kept most of it, giving Rita a paltry sum of one thousand dollars. After her release, old and decrepit, she returned to her village where she spent the rest of her days. In my poem, “Rita Falling from the Sky,” I try to conjure those interminable miles she roamed, over hostile terrain and forbidding landscape, to arrive in Kansas.
I was hardly able to catch my breath after my expedition into the desert with Rita when Drake reached out to me to write something to accompany a photography exhibit at the Whitney Museum in New York. I dropped everything and said Yes. Simplified, the photos were of transvestite prostitutes working in a border cantina. I knew La Frontera well enough, the Ciudad Juárez and Las Cruces border, as I had been going down there since I was a kid, smuggling a load or two of marijuana across that very border.
The photographs touched a nerve. Chicanos are a hybrid culture, Indio-euro, born when the first Native American woman was raped or loved by the invading marauders from Europe. Thus, the Mestizo was born. I am Indio-euro or, in my own Chicano assignation, Mestizo-Genazaro, and that ethnic split in my heritage and genetic makeup gives me a certain insight into the gender split of these men. Because I am bicultural, the project piqued my intrigue as transvestites also are composed of two opposing parts—female personalities trapped in male bodies. And while Indio-euro is my bloodline, Chicanismo is my soul and culture. This identity is informed by an American life in general but also by one who has done prison time. And a day after I talked to Drake on the phone, FedEx dropped off a packet stuffed with photographs. They were magnificent.
This psychic split was a theme I wanted to explore and without wasting a second I spread the photos across the floor and studied them one by one and tried to respond to them. I followed the contours of each erotic body, trying to read their suppressed pain through their attitude, decipher their sexualized eyes and painted faces, and interpret my own feelings about my own mixed ethnic makeup. It went quickly. The lurid and vulgar portraits suggested secrets to reveal. My job was to fling open the portals of their strange and eerie world. Their images—at once vulnerable and defiant as corner prostitutes, the flammable poses and dark features and spiked high heels and sparkle of their cheap lipstick, nail polish, and black fishnet nylons—doused my interest with combustible fuel that exploded in me. They stared at me from the photos as if I was their hostage, gripped by their sorrowful hands and legs. I wrote through the night into the next afternoon, lifting the veil of each male victim dressed as a woman, who would all eventually be murdered or die from drug overdoses. By the end of the following day I was stuffing first-draft poems into a FedEx pack to be over-nighted to Drake.
My piece was titled “Smoking Mirrors,” and the exhibit was popular enough that the University of Washington published my poem and Drake’s photographs into a book to commemorate our collaboration. The book is entitled Que Linda La Brisa (La Brisa being the name of a transvestite cantina in La Zona, the red-light district in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico).
After that, and still feeling the injustice done to these people, I was more than willing to lose myself in another project that might absorb me to such an extent that I could separate myself from that bitter reality on the border. I had been depressed for weeks when my friend the photographer Norman Mauskopf walked into my house. This man’s got more balls than a herd of bulls and an eye to capture the essence of his subjects that rides the highest rails of creativity. He asked me to compose a long poem to accompany his photographic history of northern New Mexico Chicano culture.
The result is “Singing at the Gates.” Whimsical in style, nostalgic, and contemporary in tone, it is a simple celebration of Chicano culture, a sort of pencil drawing of myself in myriad forms, sketched in metaphors and images and lyrical language. More symbolic than practical, here is a personal myth that blows my heart-seed hopes and dreams over the land where I grew up and still inhabit, in freedom and in the ideal faith that I will have a life free from the yoke of oppression and imprisonment I experienced for twenty-five years.
This poem carries a lot of primal significance for me, a pivotal memorial to my liberation from the shackles of illiteracy by teaching myself to read and write in prison. It is sometimes fierce and compassionate in its commitment to overcome day-to-day adversity, an outraged dystopian cry for La Plebe to rise and demand their rights be respected, merging genres to achieve something larger than me.
To conclude this collection, I include recent poems that connect to the plight of people struggling against the oppression of class, of poverty, of apathy, and the struggles of war. In a way these poems bring us around to the beginning of the collection—where the fight for self, dignity, and meaning rages against man-made boundaries and larger-than-life obstacles.
The poems collected here express not only the four decades of my journey, but also the journeys of other lives that parallel my own battles, hopes, aspirations, and dreams. From inside the walls that hold us and divide us, language has the means of breaking through into light, love, freedom, and celebration of life. All of us experience conflict with joy and pain. All of us with genuine voices—not scarecrow mimicry that borrows and copies—create a sublime journey to find beauty in what is considered the mundane.
SINGING
AT THE GATES
EXCERPTS FROM THE MARIPOSA
LETTERS
22
I am like the colorful Quetzal Bird
glowing rich and heavy
flung wings splattering against early skies
my cries dripping like red paint on the white horizons
23
I handle the glittering diamond-hilt of hate daily
and decide what to do
24
memories tangle up in trees like gigantic cobwebs
25
and the winds sputtered their jowls like horses
wrenching the wretched roots of me
26
you walk in robes of the world’s moonlight
around you like a ghostly nightgown
you blood-burning witch and queen cat
purring with your womb lips
27
carrying the echoes of our dreams
that grit their teeth along my bones nightly
and hammer along my heart for a secret passage
28
I realize prison is but another name for a long long night
in which the one you most love is absent
*
35
This morning
still half asleep beneath my blankets
I’d brush your hair with my fingers
rub your flanks do
wn
following over your hips
down sleek firm lengths of your thigh,
more than this:
the warmth I’d feel in my heart
the many things I have done in this life
all settled now like residue
asleep in the honey feeling of morning
as I touched you.
36
When leaves spin through the air
like green diamonds, I have always felt
the need to put my pants on,
tie my boots on, don a loose cotton shirt
and go walking, breathing in and out
tramping great distances
on the side of the road
as cars passed to and from.
37
I have begun to speak a new language.
With you, I touch on words I never knew existed.
I can’t vocalize them, but within me
a whole land of people have finally found
their mother tongue
and now I feel I belong, finally with meaning
at the root of each word
that little red dictionary
I leaf through hour by hour now
amazed at the wealth of language
38
I feel like a child with you, woman
learning love, slowly writing out my feelings
in big letters across the sky
and able to touch your heart like a leaf
39
We are children. And you and I
always amazed
by the immeasurable found in flowers
or the gold in sunny days
or the kingdoms we see in the moon.
They say our dreams are not real. They say
there the real world.
We look at each other and smile.
I hug you because your slippers are made
of mooncloth when you step to kiss me.
40
We are like the butterfly and hummingbird;
we have felt hurt a million times like buckshot in our wings
41
My thoughts surface for air
almost frightened and angry
then the thoughts return
swimming upstream to breeding grounds
to the clear pebbly-blue shallows of my heart.
42
I somehow find someone sitting on porch stoops with the same mind
as mine, and we find laughter, tears, stories
we each dream a woman, and if that dream is broken,
each man breaks inside himself, his life becomes a long
feverish tribal dance, his days haze
in the flurry of bongo hands
while his neck and head shake and fling
to sweet sad music, no longer slow,
his pulses like piano keys plink and tum
squeak and ring
the dream between his jaws
chewed like cocaine on his long swirling inward journey,
veins twisting up tight and knotted
the wrist dangling and wrenched and snapped into clapping
as the song goes on, of man without woman
*
51
Woman, speaking about when my cock
enters, plunges the far wells of your womb,
I will tell what I want,
what secrets I wish to come forth
from my questioning cock, nosing deep
into your still water, rippling the silent blue
silver, the water surface
in the jungly jeweled depths of your womb
struck with my sunlight, quivering with my
drumming balls
I want your hips to shake
like a fish flapping out of water
your hips slapping and whipping
from side to side
as if your womb lips were gills
sucking feverishly at my oxen-thick cock
prodding you, your womb unfolding
like a butterfly from the golden petal of the afternoon,
to flick wings quickly
as if dancing on air your buttocks swishing
grinding trance-like
not a second still, jiggling the soft loins
of your legs, lathering love honey between
our legs, under and down our legs dripping
explode for me woman in furious waves and lashes
a thousand times a minute sweep and rip
your hips, your ass, your pelvis into me
like a wild mare in a stall of fire
unleashing your groans and snarls
your cunt clawing and grabbing
for more male cock, King Lord of woman’s flesh,
woman devour and plunder me
52
I take your flesh in my hands
each caress a small delicate string
I pluck slowly then speed my fingers through
your legs meander along the bed sheets
my fingers play expresses to your body
plucking fast and
running my fingers across
your breasts as if they were nights
your nipples moons and my hands huge wings
plucking our song
your whimperings
my sweet elongated mumbles
*
56
Dressed in peasant skirt, Spanish dancer dress
Mexican blouse, garters, black panties and stockings,
perfumes, diamonds, shoes with slender straps, woman!
you rise for all my needs,
all I ever wanted in a woman with feathers and beads and paint
my fingers smoldering embers
from our night’s fire
all your coves and caves, all my mountains and plains,
your coves filled with my flooding waters,
your caves with my bones and meat, my plains
with your ploughs and crumbled dirt clods,
mist everywhere, our bodies move slowly,
never leaving the other’s touch, filling in and nestled
in each other’s curves, licking your arms, you kiss and caressing
with your lips my loins, your beloved man
as it was meant to be dear woman, woman, woman, woman . . .
*
62
I feel much like a fisherman with his plate
of hard biscuit and cold fish before him
63
How far will a man go and what is he to do
in the face of truth that doesn’t even look like truth
but feels hidden inside somewhere
like wild animals gnawing away on prehistoric bones?
I’ve hidden deep within me that kind of truth,
the kind that snarls when you come too close to it.
*
77
Though in prison, though I rage at times at the ignorance
and stupidity and coarseness and cruelty
behind bars, at keepers and kept,
I turn to you filling the air that I breathe
air churned darkly and heavy with steep systems
and though I say nothing,
walking early through prison mornings
my voice you hear cannot be drowned out
because by you giving me your great
spaces of love and filling them with my love,
my voice cannot be
drowned out
over flooding the banks or prison
seeping into its dark dungeon hell-holes
bursting those hell-holes like dams frothing with light,
with my unrelenting cry of love and hope,
with my being in the very air entwining with yours
like stuff that falls from moon and enchants roots
like stuff that falls from sun soaking buds to bloom
that stuff is our love flowing through air
to cultivate wild the rocky regions of roses burgeoning
now, this very moment, as I write
this to you woman.
*
85
Construction men finished the other side
of the dormitory, and I’m sitting here
basking in the slamming noise of gates
and I’m sitting here
thinking hopefully that the other side of the dormitory
will be better, it’s painted pale white
and got new sinks and showers
and I’m sitting here thinking I’ll get a bunk
by the window so the morning sun
will shine in on me
and maybe the guys won’t blast their tv’s
and stereos, maybe I won’t have fools living next to me
at six o’clock in the morning screeching out their icy noise
and I’m sitting here thinking all this
when the gate at my back opens,
a few construction men walk in, hard hatted,
dusty clothed and they start hooking up this thing,
slip an old rubber orange hose through a triangle
cut into the screen that separates us from the guards,
and they begin to hook this hose up
ten feet away from me,
and outside I hear this rumble start up
and loud sputters pat! pat! spit! spit-pat!
and the orange hose bloats up like a python
coupled to this thing of steel
they clamp a huge chisel
one hard hatted mug grabs a shovel and stands
next to his wheelbarrow
and the other grabs this thing like a gatling gun
and hell breaks open with loud crunches and blasting
at the granite floor,