"cabrones" poems
Excuse me Sir, I'm ready to order.
Can I please get some breakfast sandwiches
and a couple of bagels?
Uh, excuse me rudeness! What the hell was that look for?
Can you believe this motherfucker?! One look at my nopal
and he went straight into his skinhead manners brown paper bag
and picked up a big ol' hand full of **** you" and put it all
over his ******* face.
I like how now racism has a new look.
Indifference and side ways looks.
I still ******* matter.
I have a right to be where I please.
As a matter of fact, I have a right to be.
If I want a bagel I would like it without
a side of Caucasian *******
Pinches gringos cabrones.
May 17, 2013
May 17, 2013 at 3:39 PM UTC
There's an atm in my neighborhood
That gives out singles,
Or three of them,
Or seven,
And so on.
It sits next to the drywall box
Filled with EBT dinners,
Next to the numbered gas pumps.
It glows in the predawn air,
While I sit on a cement wall
Across the street.
That hunk of junk charged me $3.75 to take out $7.
Next to me a man tells his inquisitive boy
Why the police act as they do.
"They the cops, man.
Not you."
I'm watching with rapt fascination
The ten inch screen
Of some wheelchair-bound woman's
Educational tablet,
While her hand, twisted by palsy,
Taps at a magnified qwerty pad.
She's playing hangman,
And I silently,
Secretly,
Guess along with her for almost fifteen minutes.
The bus arrives, and I'm grateful
It's the doubled kind with the hinge in the middle,
Cuz maybe I won't have to stand.
I take the empty seat next to
A Salvadoreña co-worker
I sometimes ride in to work with.
Our conversations are limited,
As are her English and my Español.
We laugh at the Georgetown gringitas
lining up with their morning runners' clubs,
And lament over the cabrones pobres
Peddling to strangers for jobs
Outside the big box hardware store
That won't hire them.
The sun rises as we cross the Key bridge,
And the wounded Washington Monument,
With its scaffolding and the floodlights leaking through,
Is a diamond-studded phallace
Shining over a town draped in a shroud of humidity.
I close my eyes and try to rest
For the eleven minutes between
Me and my desk.
Aug 4, 2013
Aug 4, 2013 at 5:52 PM UTC
the hippies called
the puerto ricans
spics
the puerto ricans
called the hippies
cabrones
not much love
there
but mostly
they got along
sharing the dirt
and hopeless
avenues
i knew a girl
with long legs
and longer hair
who stood barefoot
on the corner of
110th Street and
Lexington Avenue
selling flowers
she only had
one gift to give
and she gave it
and in the rain
her petals
washed down
the gutters
and magically
made the streets
clean again
~mce
Oct 24, 2015
Oct 24, 2015 at 5:03 PM UTC