This is for the residents who remember
And for the transplants who
Have yet to be informed
But have got an inkling

Burque has gone from
Bustling to busted
And back again

Growing up in the 80’s
I learned about the
Varying degrees of “sick”
As my dad pointed out
The pekid pachucos perusing
Pharmacy isles
Attempting to purchase
Cough syrup with codeine

In the evenings
Driving home down Central
I would ceremoniously
Count hookers

My parents would
Precariously pack heat
In the trunk of our car
Or even in my mom’s special ***** pack
With the hidden compartment
For her .38 snub nose
Because you never know
Who will be in your home
When you arrive

That’s a given
When flop houses are
Interwoven with prime real estate
And barrio boundaries
Border the bourgeois’ bungalows
And Huning’s Castles

And residents rarely recognize
Or realize
That aside from the locals
The European Jews
Was the only group gutsy enough
To settle here
And create commerce
Despite risks of being raided
By Apaches

And they reaped the benefits
Off Roma and Marquette
Because the rewards
Turned out to be greater than
The risks

And up North
Where Sephardic turned Crypto
Conversions to Catholicism
Kept the Messiah’s spirit alive
But in basements
They still did Chi fives!

I was saddened in middle school
When I realized
That many of our parents
Were too ashamed of our roots
To teach us Spanish
And our
Schools ****** so severely
That most of us
Didn’t learn English either

But hey –
All you need to
Communicate while cruising
Are cat calls
And the thumping boom
Of the bass in the tubes
And the hydraulic drop
When they hit
The hot spots
From Tingley, Kit Carson and
Central to Copper
Each kid dreams that
His ride
Will be the show stopper

I could rant and rave
And rattle off for days
But bottom line –
We have the most
Curious state
With mysterious qualities
And in-depth histories
But most of us are
More concerned with
Bud Light
And Biscochitos
Con Manteca
Because it just tastes great!

We are possibility.
Nothing undone:
the red key swung,
the pins aligned.
     Spite and Malice -
you won in Burque;
in Buffalo, in April,
I'll be writing in coffee shops.

Cage made fake acrostics
and clamoured more than us.
He watered himself in blenders
tacked his piano like stigmata.

But really, he just put the right letter
on the correct line (if he
ever wrote a line),
but our house was a mess
of books and skulls
and everywhere you looked
too perfect a nest,

so we tore ourselves apart.
Why don't we stop?
Someone will spend graduate school
anthologizing our correspondence,
analyzing the details we missed,
et al., hic et nunc.

The girls dancing in Budapest
and the guys making passes at you in the snow
reduce us to baser instincts
by counting how we
could, might, tentatively
hurt again
on our second-class driver's test.

Fortunately, I am with you
when you look at computer screens
and you're with me at the bar
when television commercials
show off their bras and the beer hits
harder than libretto
and snus drips down the candle wax
making arcs like the Scott Monument.

The imperfection is bliss,
the knots loosen and move
up our spines. We'll soak
the tub and swell
our glands with menthe
and tumble
     further down the mud,
until we either love or ****
what makes us whole.