In the Blazing Cities of your Rotten Carcass Mouth

Too bad we live in a world so uptight that we can't
have things like the Frito Bandito anymore.
- Comment on Youtube

The children were eating the bushes outside of their former houses
that had been crushed by The Bank of America.

There was a boy in a bush singing an improvised song about a
bulldozer that obliterates the bureaucratic centers of the earth.

Do you remember cheese, he sang to his friend.

Te acuerdas de la piña?

Do you remember terries, he sang to his friend.

Te acuerdas de los patos?

Do you remember school bells and cowards and the boys who would
come to our yard to eat the scraps of food we threw to them before
the city started to blaze?

Bienvendios a CVS. Si cuenta con tu Extra Care Card please escanea
it now.

There really wasn't money anymore or at least there wasn't money
for us.

The man with the camera kissed me and took photographs of the
blood that dripped from my fingers.

Everyone knew he was CIA.

He knew for example that the blood that dripped from my face
tasted like the blood of the workers assassinated by the Fatherland.

Then I found a dying shack and I met a man with a chain and he
was snoring and talking in his sleep and he smelled like pee and
complained he had lost his pension when they privatized the city in
the dying days of the rotten carcass economy.

Looking after the world is a shitty job if you're really not a
people-person.

He slept on the floor with a chain tied to him.

It rode over his crotch and for twenty-three dollars he would bless
you into heaven so you would not have to remain in the purgatory of
the blazing city.

The further I fall the smaller I become, he chanted.

This poem would be better if it took place in The Saloon of Good
Fortune. It would be better if a man jumped off the bar and onto my
back as I was reciting it. If I caught him on my back and smashed
him into a table. If one of his hoodlum buddies smashed me over the
head with a bottle of tequila. This poem would be better with just
the right amount of sex, alcohol, violence and 195os border-noir.

The chained man was moaning about how he had gone from office
to offhice to see what the Lord had to offer.

And all I have now, he sang, is a chain and a basket full of
hngernails.

An old brown dog was tied by another chain to a rafter.

The dog wouldn't stop yapping and I understood I was being refused
absolution.

But I'm Jewish, I told the dog. I am a member of la raza de Moises.

He barks love, the chained man sang, and he wouldn't stop singing
and I needed to rest so I would be able to find the boat that would
help me get away.

I sat on the floor to sleep, woke up in chains and there was no one to
tell my story to.

I lay stiff, holding my breath, trying to be anyone but myself.

Imagination challenge #1: Imagine there is a matzah-ball bandito
in your house.You buy lots of matzah balls and mix them with
jalapenos and Fritos and light them on fire and then you survive the
apocalypse because Fritos can stay lit on fire forever and you don't
need to find kindling or any of that other stuff so you finally have
time to study Karlito Marx while watching Manchester United's
Mexican hero Chicharito Hernandez score a poacher's golazo in
the waning seconds of the Carling Cup while eating hallucinogenic
mushrooms while watching Eric Estrada in C.H.I. P.S. on another
screen and listening to a podcast of the book of Leviticus on your
iPod Touch while Skyping with your mom while sexting with your
boyfriend who works for the secret police.

Write a sonnet or a villanelle about this experience and do not use
any adjectives.

Then I clutched a man trapped beneath my body.

He refused to stop breathing and so did I.

It was 98 degrees.