Tell a story about men like my father;
robbed of chance they beget opportunity. (blood is thicker than latex)
One morning over coffee and sweet bread
he turned to me, eyes like Aztec stones, and
asked me to wipe the sweat from the wells under
his eyes, because he had spend his entire life
gathering buckets of hope for my garden
and it was time to grow.

Talk about the magic of a lie,
waving it about amongst the crowd like
a wand, saying things like:
I’ve written two books, both bibles for the underground
miserablés; or that I met Garcia Marquez at a bar in
Columbia, he waiting for solitude,
already a legend, almost a myth
and I, clicking the ballpoint pen,
a cousin of disappointment
waiting for the waitress to serve me greatness.

Stumbling through the Garment District
of Los Angeles I want to meet
every paleta being licked dry to the center
by those who hold them  (those who own them)
and say: one day we will be too big to be held
by any hand, or bought by any man
yet I know mortgages are not paid with illusions,
& so I just keep on walking, head buried in a pile of shame
like an ostrich, a stranger to my own fate.

Write about the delicate moments shattered by
the violent current of love;
use metaphors like, hail kamikazes
exploding on my glass ceiling, or, watermelons
balanced on the oval head of caricatures. Intentionally
be wordy and overly poetic, use metaphors that make no sense
like love when it is abandoned in jest.

Stare out the window of some overpriced coffee shop
and tell every woman that I am writer
hungry for a muse, burning inside for love, or lust,
recognition, a word or arrangement that will
give me some meaning, something I can put in parentheses.
Tell my father I will be buried in Westminster Abbey next to
Shakespeare, or in Granada, a companion of anonymity, of Lorca;

Watch my father put his monumental arms on my still frame
and say: I wanted to teach, but instead I am a laborer,
be happy being buried next to your mother, or grandpa.
Stare into his fading profile and wonder if the oracle
knew about my father when Socrates asked who was the wisest man.

Close the journal at night and wait for death to open your eyes
to what I am saying.

Originally written in 2004