Ajedrez
Marble, glass, silver
But mostly wood
The pieces that venture
Out for the kingdom
Maneuvers till you are once
Again in skirmishes surrounded by
Danger,
Crocodiles ready to eat you,
Swords sharp de-neck.
Episodes of medieval attire
Environment it takes you
Back to the game the war
To origins of poetry
Among the warriors,
Europe the Middle East
Epoch medieval
Not so different
Slow division grew.
More similar worlds
Popular people in their
Habitual mess and hardships,
Bread ovens fire
Finger breaks the dough.
Mouth reaching
The curry spice incense
The air, swallow the blend
Dirt moisture atmosphere.
War raging children the women
Are free,
Manitas de Plata Gypsy guitar
His singer in a tune sang:
That woman belong to no one,
“No son de nadie”
Manitas finger popping in the
Back dark,
La dama the queen, woman has the
Most power, Freedom
King just sits throne
Waiting to be cuckold
Cabrón,
Made motionless,
I do not envy nor want his power,
I am satisfied being a peon-peasant
After all if I reach that octave line
I could be transformed into a knight
Or the dama, become woman-queen,
With all that power, I can swing
Lesbo macho across the board
Jumping all possible moves, positions,
Make like a damsel harlot
Red lipstick lip
Sputtering bird whispers,
Watch dinosaurs collapse,
Or toothless old witch
Weaving churning machista
Males like tapetes throwing wood
Into the fire for generations
Bitches aged like Rioja wine
Embroidery of burgundy thread,
Fall into those webs
Submit to green devils
Sitting in the kitchen.
The spider knows what
It weaves: Survival.
Chess has its initial stance
Bravado at commencement
As to turn roosters
Into chickens,
Is it like Puerto Rican dominoes?
Where straw hats and mustaches
Grow caca fear into rivals.
Nothing-la Chucha
It is just ciphers
Pieces fall into hands thru
Chance destiny at grab.
My friend Juan Belen
Once commented upon a group
Of domino players
“They are being antisocial
Dialogue.
It is also a long stretch of math
Repetitive boredom
Lucky it is spiced with jokes,
Machismo bouquets,
In Cafetíns near jukeboxes
Boleros poetry of tragedy
The dama sublime
Sprays the shuffling passage
Intervals into the sound
Of ivory rectangles
Against wooden table, scratch.
The social of chess for me
Is always memoirs of my son
Vitin-Ajani.
With my young cousins Arian y Ariel,
Watching them excited each
Time they paralyze my king.
I’ve yet to teach my Moroccan son
The game
Thus there is a chess-full of
Expectations ahead
Schemes-sacrifices
Responsibilities of what
Practical life is,
Taking the game out of the
Zone of jihad
And opening it up to endless
Moves of awareness
Locking the king up
The king is never killed
Assassinated
In the end he is just captured,
Frozen stripped of his powers,
His majesty revives
Like in real vida
He resurrects reincarnates
Once again beside his
Magnificent queen,
In the game of eternal scheme
To obliterate the powerful
Succumb to the harmony of
The plot, submit the power.
Share-scatter the puzzle
Breaking into motion
Piece by peace
Paz
Paseo.
Spanish Language
Primero my Spanish is birth in small mountain town Puerto Rico; it is mother and father, the first bright sunlight of my vocal sounds. But how much Spanish was it, given we were at such a distance from the Iberian Peninsula, an ocean puddle away within climatic metamorphosis, in the Caribbean sprinkled with indigenous Taino words, a mix of vocals from various West African languages. Our Spanish was already the curvy swift mouthing of Andalucía Spanish, the southern bite, along with Canary Island salt which came to the Caribbean in 1492, the same year in the peninsula that Antonio de Nebrija published Gramática de la lengua castellana. It was published the same year of the collapse of the last Muslim stronghold of Granada, 1492, thus is a pivotal year for the Spanish language and Latino peoples. I remember as a child my mother would always say to me, “Mira lo que te voy a decir,” Look at what I am going to tell you, but she spoke it, do you hear or see language, I conclude finally that the Spanish is intense, images, colors yes. Bright is my view of the movie of my past, when the mountains melted and the buildings surfaced, green became red and gray bricks, it was a sight and it was sound energy. Views of the island linger, recall vivid the rainwater falling huge drops playing timbales upon the newly paved streets. Good portion of our lives we are knocked out in bed like fools curled into an 8 dreaming, remembering, and thinking. What was that dream all about; I carry pictures into the morning café aroma as frames dissolve escaping like vapor. Caribbean language verbose is sun bright light like the days, soundings pierces and comes at you. The Andalucian poet Lorca used the phrase “white milk.” What other color could milk be. He does it to throw more fire into the idea of sight, it is not just milk but “white milk,” twice the emphasis, so color repeats enlarges becomes more of itself and in another poem “verde que te quiero verde,” green that I want you green, green twice thus more green, once is not enough. All the Spanish poets have this color consciousness, this color emphasis, stronger among the Andalusian writers. That is the Spanish that came to our Caribbean island that was the Spanish of my small town, of my family. As the Spanish poet Pedro Salinas wrote in a small gem of a book, which he wrote while living in Puerto Rico, Aprecio y defensa del lenguaje, “El Labrador, el campesino de cualquier pais de vieja civilización habla bien, le gusta hablar bien, admira al que habla bien.” Through our Spanish language we are part of that old civilization, our Latin classical connection. The language was for me grandfather the tobacconist in a white suit rolling cigars singing boleros if not listening to a lector read Spanish poetry of the Golden Age. The poignancy-importance of Spanish sight is emphasized by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí when in their film Un Chien Andalou, A Dog from Andalusia, they show a barber ready to slice with his sharp shaving razor a beautiful woman’s eyes, quickly the scene changes to a goat who gets the razor slash and we behold that creamy goo spilling out. It was a comment Buñuel made on the intensity of the image, seeing, the eye, the visual in our Latino-Spanish-Arábico culture. In our daily life, in our Eros, in our religiosity, in the everyday of poetry. Dalí’s paintings are t
his same perception of memory, a visual remembrance of dreams. Appear. Mira now look at what I am going to tell you, my mother was giving me something which was in the language. Spanish has close to four thousand Arab words which flowered within it. The Arab tongue saw the infancy of the Castilian, the encounter of Latin and Arabic which gave birth to the Spanish language. Thus it is something within it besides vocabulary, cadence perhaps; when I am in Tétouan, Morocco, and listen to people switching from the Arabic to the Spanish it feels like the same language lingo, a continuum of the rhythm cadence, flipped over, force in the two lenguas. Language plays a strong role in our Latino/Arábico communities, what people say carries monumental weight, my uncle José Antonio Hernández, the last of the Aguas Buenas tabaqueros once told me sitting on the balcony of his house, cigars stacked upon his work table next to us, tobacco aroma all around, he said to me something relevant to language, “It is better to get slapped in the face than to have someone talking about you in the vicinity.” It was an example of the importance of language in our community. It is like this within the Arabic-Islamic communities as well. Words are hatchet blows, they are fierce like fire. Look at the fate of Salman Rushdie, the scramble that was caused by his words, I am totally for the freedom of expression of Rushdie, for him to communicate social, spiri tual, religious doubt and write it down, it is the role of the writer to question. Yet the affair emphasized the importance of language in the Muslim sphere, that a group of words written down can condemn a person to death. The majority of the Iranian people were against this death sentence (according to a survey taken around the time of the crisis), many claiming that it was opposed to Islamic law in which first there must be a trial on the issue. You would not have known this if you were being informed by American media. Words are the emotions of our relationships. The meaning that guides us, that loves us, divides us, deceives us. In the Spanish language there is a fire, tongue seems to be flinging flames, the Arab is yet much more forceful. Words are the invocation of prayers, the route to spirit. Spain had a cross mixture of ethnicities, the most unlikely European nation of Europe. It is a brew of indigenous Iberian, Roman-Hispano, Celtic, Visigoth, Jewish, Arabic, Berber, and Gypsy. The scholar Robert S. Briffault in the book The Troubadours, a text which I have been aware of for decades, talking about the Spanish language, tells us: “when, later, Castile expanded southward the Arabo-Romance vernacular of Andalusia became the foundation of the Castilian tongue.” I could read El Quixote of Cervantes which is from the 1600s yet I could not penetrate the Middle English of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales till I found a good contemporary English translation. Spanish developed into maturity and remained on a cruising plateau for centuries. My shaky character is always in English; my major mistakes have been in English. Spanish is the language in which my father gave me direction and firm scoldings. The Spanish language molded a character in me that escapes me in the English, slowly with the passage of years I have dressed the English with my Latin-Español apparel, make the English more respectful, fill it with manners, the protocol of salutation. The warmth, the moisture the colors the force, beat this mischievous English hard, bend it till it screams, set it on fire, cook it, watch it melt into the urgencies of my expression.
Latin Boogaloo
To Francisco Cabanillas
Back in the small town
A child
I used to think there was
A man living under the plaza,
In a subterranean basement.
I used to call him Manolo,
Possible I had sight of him once
Fleeting
Had something in his mouth
Like what is on wine: cork.
Why did I think/imagine?
Schizoid this child play.
I never got to consult my mother
About such such, older, mature.
Wonder
Who else was hearing the voice?
Fiestas patronales,
This one for the dark
Virgin La Montserrat,
Throngs of blue white dresses
Girls, perfume dancing dizzy.
Spinning there la estrella
Ferris wheel
Some ride the Gusano
The worm,
Bigger kids screaming
Every time a cover curtain closed
Over them
Moment blackness,
Watch out the hands
Girls thighs, buttocks,
Ass softure through
The panty nylon-jersey-cotton.
Julio the Bohemio got on
The flying chairs one night,
Cane liquor as if liver.
Till someone said is raining shit
Shit, even on shit shit
A jienda split in sense.
Not even the time of day
Where? Whence?
Take him home
Like a lumber.
The river down we went
Mother Abuela loads of clothes
Bang upon
Rocks with planks of wood,
The village streets
Motion cars, trucks throwing
Cement all over, wooden houses
Disappearing.
Cars that became airplanes
Take off,
Clouds
Landing later upon ice,
No coats winter snow
Traveling hicks,
Become as we entered,
Lucky relatives brought
Warm apparel,
Some Rican relative
With a 50s Packard
Look like a giant frog.
First thing for me
Entering building was smell
Cold cement iron
Marble stairs
Climbing like zigzag
Long halls pasillo paseo,
To Apartment house-home
Novo Bohío tis was,
Open door
There quick kitchen
Sink, bathtub
Scope first time.
Railroad flat.
Americanos whosit
Them
Start calling us the Spanish
Like we language sound
Not bone-meat.
Bizarre mestizos
Drop into blender
Moving buildings, streets
Windows rotating
Lengua licking
Bricks the savannah birds
Frozen in the past,
Because now accent in both
Languages, both are on loan to me,
Pictures climb up
A division
Thoughts of nothing?
Nothing created nothing.
El boogaloo dancing between
Walls the new vocals
To understand lips
Fast machine tongue spit,
STOP
Slow down
Grind it up bone tight,
Park visuelos window
Vasitos de colores,
With the syllabic injuries
Make suns in semi blue
Skies.
One time Bronx
With the language of Cervantes
Trying to make sense
Of all the nothing that
Everything became,
Bringing it back to focus,
Latin Manhattan
Like Virgil war stories,
Bickering family,
Uncle threw a knife slash
At own shadow,
The way they lost Andalusia
The Moros endaggaring
One to the other
Petit arguments,
They were overtaken by two cousins
Having sex.
Package of baggage,
Like Checo once said
In the Cantina
When he migrated to New York
In a job interview Porican asked
him if he
Knew how to “empaquetar,”
And he had to
pause before answer,
Since in Puerto Rican
“Empaquetar” could mean swindling
Deceit as if in lying,
But he got through the double
Entendre duplex triplex
Sound waves of meaning,
Later out tenement window
Down the street with 3 p.m. café
Eye peeling
Sipping the past as the present
Sugar dissolves Sonia appears
And Carmen’s far corner curves
Like walking question marks ??
Upon the street venture
Caffeine retina scoping joking
As life is a vacilón,
Ah sí la cojo.
In Manhattan the Spanish and
English underground
Half city is in el tren way sub
The number 6 Lexington
Spent my youth in motion
Lower East Side/East Harlem
Vaivén yo-yo
La Marketa fruits and Tropical
Vegetables, panas, ñame, yautia
Speechless objects what could
Translate taste like.
The 6 to the Bronx Music Palace
Hunts Point learning how to
Read maraca seeds shaking in
The sonneteers palms,
Accents smeared like lipstick
Red the line of the lips
Crossed like a border.
New York Ricans chopped the
Cuban Son up,
Out of clave momentarily,
Put English lyrics
For the now generation,
Project verbose,
Fast chops of James Brown
Southern orange soda,
Saintly kitsch orange camisas,
A vamp stomp to stop your heart
Charge
Timbale chops like
Knives slicing air,
Jump
Trombones in unison
A quake like the South Bronx
Wanna fall down collapse.
Mambo melts Flamenco foot