My bones still feel humid
Above these clouds
As I soak in these days

A song with strangers in the rain
Una pachada
my voice softer than ever

Humid walls
Faded colours, vivid people
bright warm darkness and so many stars!

I can feel you slowly leaking out
Life soaking back in
With this music…

You, who filled me with emptyness,
And I bled with anguish.

Now I bleed light and love and life
I’ve been awake for days
I am everywhere.

And you’re alone,
Lusting after your own charms:
Your perfect inconsolable pain.

I loved you fear and restrain.
How can I look after you
Here on this rooftop, under the scalding sun?

Now my mind sees more
And my eyes run wild
Fireworks in this cold comfort

These dunes by the ocean
Are a smaller desert
Then your desolate company.

He was a drug addict, they would tell me
He was "malo," they would say
Until a policeman lost his patience
beat him
so bad that he was in the hospital for months
And never walked again
"He had it coming" was the way they'd end the story

But as I visited with him
I discovered more

He read through the entire Bible while he was getting treatment
His spirit changed
And when he was well enough to leave the hospital bed he was taken home just to be laid down again, yet I suppose that
Sometimes he had a wheelchair

He had a job
wheeled himself across miles of dirt road to get there
people would come in, greeting and asking him, "che, como andas?" which is Argentino for "dude, how are you doing?" but a closer translation would be, "dude, how are you walking (or going)?" he would always smile from his chair and say jokingly, "i don't go, i sit."

He was married and had a little boy, Alejandrito (which means little Alexander)

And i would watch him and his family
in their little tin house patched with plywood
His wife loved him; she met him after his accident
and she was never cross about doing everything for him
they had nothing
yet enjoyed everything their poverty had to offer

my favorite phrase he ever said was:
"if your problems have solutions, why worry? and if your problems don't have solutions, why worry?"

i miss you
the way Obama misses his intelligence briefings

i finally cleaned out my bedroom
threw out
all the legos i always accidentally stepped on
all of the crusty pieces of Argentine food i wasn't ready to let go of

you are a jedi
or perhaps just my best friend

some people hurt your eyes like neon when you see them

but you don't

you are nutella
and i am a butterknife

instead of the thrumming of crickets
cockroaches
and the constant lull of the frogs by the lake

instead of late-night parties on the other side of the wall (didn't they know we were always in bed by 10:30?)
the drunken laughter of strangers
the foreign tongue that made its way into the dialogue of my dreams

instead of keeping myself up at night from the terror of
wondering what poverty-stricken, starved man might break through our poorly-fitted door to violate two helpless girls

my lullaby is the hum of a dishwasher
the creaks in the finely-polished floorboards
the purr of the computer
the cracking of ice as it slides from the dispenser in the fridge
a symphony of first-world luxury and comfort

i am up at 1:45 in the morning

and i couldn't be happier

Is there still a tired cafe
On the corner under canvas
Pondering the long boulevard?
Does the faded owner smoke all day
And complain about the haze
And how finding pretty waitresses is hard?

I once lived thereabouts
And earned a meager pay
Writing broken tales for magazines.
Nights filled my belly with wine
My eyes the chanteuse Lise
She starred in my most fictional scenes.

I never found a way
To read my ink blot cards
and learn where my psyche led me wrong
It oft' left me lonely
With just black espresso
And the echo of Lise's sweet song.

One day I moved away
Back to blue ice and snow
From that old city of fumes and haze.
Yet still on thick warm nights
A song burns in my soul
In familiar, best forgotten, ways.

There are bags under my eyes as heavy as the loads they carry through the streets (I was designed to help them)
It is easier (always) to carry burdens that are not your own
But the more I ask, the more they cling
To those one dollar bills
Fake reputations
The dead men that can't save.
Children play with dead birds in the street
And their parents roll up cigarettes from torn pages of their book of life
(They don't have time to teach their children why the trees sing sometimes)
People walk with their ribcage wide open
(Unashamed of their heartlessness;
unashamed of the slammed doors in our faces)
Sometimes I see the stars and ask myself how many times the moon had to sneeze in order for them to spatter across the sky like that
(People are moved by fear
But I am moved by lifting my legs)
I think I've forgotten who designed it all in the first place.

The television screen illuminates
the mahogany walls of His Holiness’ office
so different and distant from Marta’s casa in Iguazu,
Argentina, her handwriting in Spanish,
pleading the Holy Father from cheap paper,
to return and attend to his people.

On the screen, he sees the Garganta del Diablo
exploding in what the headline calls
‘Biblical-style’ deluge.
But He knows that the devil’s throat
spills out a more subtle evil than flooding:
a secret hatred,
disjointed humanity,
greed and gluttony
and outpour of passion of futbol
rather than prayer.

My child, he writes,
these falls bless the earth--
only God causes the floodgates to open
and only together do we feel holy presence
in the river’s spray.

He licks his finger, turns over the page,
and decides he needs not write more, besides
Que Dios bendiga a tí y a Argentina.
As the television flashes scenes of his pueblo y futbol.

You choked on chariots raw. Red egg yolk suppers, churned of the milk oceans this morning you kept.
The lintel of stone turned toward dusk. Some great dynasty of submissive spirits catering your morning
Out on a cart of muse, forms of heaven cannot even hear you. You are a soporific knot in the tale of your Old womanhood. In this infinite Tuesday morning your small black eyes, like an oil tanker toppling over The intense azure sea- shipwrecked, and lost.

Departing from your childhood you slurp Coca-Cola from a silver straw. From the corner store and inside Winter yawns. There is no face, only strikingly beautiful black hair. The body under you is at home in all
My hand's fingers have to fill. All the clothes that you could carry for the two-way adventure. There are
Never enough bubbles between your lips and the glass bottle you have. Only the score of the whistleblower. And the poor symphony you had prayed for into the dial-tone phone, the deep Wilderness, that stiff forever-ago budding from your coffee cup. Neurogenesis lifted from your Fingerprints and emblazoned into this lump of human ingenuity. The hopeless octave that cut us all short.    

Every short story that was left untold. There are the brief deaths recoiling in your spiritual architecture. The ****** of morphia has bourn me awake. Inside you are often unscathed, vanishing as some of Tonight's parts assemble you, on you blue is a beautiful color. The sweet retreat that gave you life or the bountiful deaths that counted you too cutely by your side. You are the sun in my black coat. Here is my sea, your sea, you'll see.