ode to Lisa Lisa

Judy Torres loving Frankie.
sends questions punctuated by pussyfoots
oh, so not hot.
never lost in emotion
or short of words when in your face
stevie b or babyface
tka
taste my cookiecakes

Ghost stories

get out the DSM. put your jammies on.
i'm gonna tell you a bedtime story-
not a lullaby, but with allegory.
did you say you saw a ghost?
or do you just so badly need to see me scared
a glowing vulnerability
dabbed behind the ears like a perfume
yes, it feels that contrived.
and this time you've lost your charm.
there are those for whom the spectre of death
is as cheap as their cologne
and matching gold chain.
I don't care enough to cast
spells or throw
stones
so, suave: ghosts jolt you that much?

XXX: tribute to peaches

Last night I thought I'd try something new
went to a danceclub meets bar cum live nude drawing
sponsored by a pornsite, I believe...
gathered were a crowd of artsies, sketching manerist scenes
charcoal pencils in one hand
glass of tinto vino on the other
and I produced a cheap lil poem:

a room full of hungry eyes
the sirens seem more vapid
in real time/space
been replaced by hipster chicks
apparently american apparel
meets fish net sex
Bettie Page times three - removed
charming
Medusa's circle ciphers a bad
scene from a Vice Magazine

Chico Plastico: Revisited

“Se ven las caras, vaya, pero nunca el corazon…Panama presente"
A roll call for aesthetic sake
The song winds through the countries of our homes
El chico plastico conducts a symphony of faces – always with exquisite restraint
For a freak of control, he has bright eyes and a smile worth following
And great stories, the kind with jazz and energy,
But with no rhythm to take shape
Lest they’re lavishly funded.
Perhaps we could just sit here, and talk. A marxist entertainment.
And, just maybe, you’d be more content.
"y miran sin ver." Blades and Colon said it best.

Concrete Boys

Immediately vacant when clarity arrives.

Plucking compulsively at the emotive.

Concrete Boys Know the Difference between Difference as if Difference Where Never Linked to Sameness...

Cryp/tic/tic...ticking like BIG ben

(PROGRESSIVELY LESS CLEAR)

Our Types of People

We narrate everything. We play repeat on every innuendo. Tons of breaks (a little ADHD) just to make it through the day. We labor hard. Ramon Jamon el raton understands: he cleans compulsively and hoards. We each have our own hand in glove. We smoke until we choke, laughing like school girls 'bout poetry once too brilliant to share. We have a hard time tooting our own horns. Did you notice?

Wrongo Dongo

Wrongo Dongo,
Was the name of the lovely tempranillo
Drank with reminiscent words on dong gone wrong.
A stray led into the dog house
Searching for his blankie
To cloak his drunken thoughts with soil and earth: a vineyard.
Don’t shit where you eat. Vienna. Rio. Rome. Zanzibar.
Don-go down to get up. Fall if you must...
and land on a dongo.

Aloof in memory, not in moment

Aloof: [aristocratic] distance maybe even Kantian; reserved; remote; physically and emotionally unavailable; view from afar; apart; separado.

Who's going to chisle away the wall? When one is aloof is the wall even worth chisling? Adorno claims: "He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interests." Oye, herein lies the rub: when ideology is privitized, the self is priviledged; the aloof man can only converse with himself. There is really no critique of society.

Technorati Profile

Brighter Days

Smoking jane when sun hits hard. Rolled like a taught factory woman, child in belly, hidden under an oversized shirt...la factoria can't have babies growing alongside the market. Work woman.

Pedestrian

Crosswalk. No lights. Headache. Not done skimming the streets though. A lot of social notes still to take. A bastard ethnographer, viewing the ghosts of the past in the faces of now. Lost intellectual looking for community, but not the typical idea of community where simple marks, mark roughly, rather where the marks are soft and transitory. The pedestrian crosses. She is now gendered. Is she? Crosswalk. Lights on now. Flash. Flash. The pedestrian makes a face--one of anger and not confusion. Flash. Flash. "You flash. You pay." Pause. No lights. No money. Soft observations are no longer free.

Coffee Ground Divination

Babalawos use caracoles or palm nuts, depending on which route on the diaspora, to plow prophetic insight. I use coffee grounds. A reinvention of ritual, with just enough caffeine to keep sober in this concrete jungle meets modern zen garden. I say to Gaelle: “Otro cafecito, mi cielo?” And we refuel for the future past tense, old Chicago house, leaving a trail of soft espresso grounds to mark the sugar.

Weirdness in a Coma

The physical effects of words. "I am off to bed." What does this mean when only minutes ago we spoke of stitches and buttons? Supposedly, it means you are off to bed and well, one of us is still up thinking of deconstructing five words. It doesn't really end here though. One of us, did not know how to spell weirdness and so spelling it out without looking at the word, brought the correct spelling into being. Interesting. One of us, wonders how premeditated those five words were...were they preempted by the desire to escape or did sleep come too soon? I before e. E before i. EI together. Weirdness. Why not write: I am getting tired now? I will speak to you tomorrow. Why use the word "maybe"? It presupposes so much, no? Coolio, but one of us is not a maybe kind of gal. It leaves too much for the imagination. Actually, it leaves nothing to the imagination when you think of this signifier's actual intent. It means that the referent is deep, deeper than you think one of us can handle. It means: the ball is in my court; it means I got some hoops to make...
only hoops you gonna make are the hoops in my earrings.

Ma'

Oye Luna (a letter of devoted thinking),

Something's hiding. It isn't the last bit of hope, running out of Pandora's box. It isn't the betrayal played by Judas. It isn't the mouse, hurrying to a hole. The trap is chasing her. It isn't the overly psychotic, living in the borderline patient. It isn't constipation of the ass. It isn't even the real rhetoric spewed by the politicians. It is the little boy of 29 years late. He is still in love with ma'. You see, ma' had a problem: she lived for love through her son. No little boy can fill that void. Luna, what of the little boy of 29 years...late, and the ma' who loves life more than living to love the little boy? I daresay that even when ma' brings nipple to lip, the little boy will be too jilted to suck. Who is this ma' now? We shouldn't have to replace her, name her over and over again, or do without intimacy.

Affective Dishonesty

Why do we use honesty as an alibi for our performances of dishonesty? The answers are innumerable. 1.) Fear of rejection; 2.) Little or no ontological understanding of self; 3.) Confusion (albeit believing in "I don't knows" is far too easy a retreat.) Perhaps getting at the why is inessential right now. Maybe the core of the issue is rather simple: the performance clown crops up when too many blows to the self's imagined sense of self is exposed in a rather ambigious and even arbitrary way. Lately, it appears that to live in an unexposed way means to secure a sense of stability--a flat landing that predicts only the predictable. Dishonest or not, the mere intrusion of any emotional spectrum that encompasses too much too fast or too little or obviously plays into excess means that a dishonest paranoia of sorts will play out. For we cannot feel so much at such time or so little in such place; it isn't real--although so real--to feel beyond logic.

Chico Plastico

what does it mean to be plastico? could it be, like Blades and Colon tell us, that which melts in the sun? So what if that sun, err, were emotions? U know, what flows from the crevices of a woman's breast...ah yes, take a deep breath: te presento: emociones.
oye, chico plastico, con su pistola en tu mano, how do you blanket feelings so well?

Halfway There: This Charming Man

A charming man is always halfway there. We were halfway to the intellectual ivory tower when we decided mozzarella and bread were more important that writing a piece-- a disciplined piece-- made for publication. Despite looming deadlines, we opted for collab on the fly. Mauricio told us that he would make us chorizo at the tapas bar, but we opted for John. He was a little more provincial. With blue eyes bright as a toddler's, he spoke of days with patina. Mr. Baradino, as we later learned, had a wife, was an officer, a radio host for the Italian community, and had an archive. And hence, it was through his archeology that we discovered his soul: lively and sung. Speaking French like a working Italian in Paris, he played the drums on the counter and wooed us into a thirteen dollar tip. Not bad, for a capricious cafe on a lonely Connecticut road. He said our friend, la mexicana with almond-shaped eyes looked like the bakery girl who made his pastries, but never spoke; English was not native to her, but he liked her. Their eyes must have met in another world, where the subtitle is dialogic, even without words. We live through our stories on which ever side of analysis we lie. We are beings because we have history; without it, there is no present future or subjuntivo. A temporal twist of fate leads us only to words. Mr. Baradino's ephemerality was the reproduction we produced in our journey; not that it wasn't there before. But we found him. But we were only halfway there. This charming man and he doesn't got a stitch to wear. His stitch was what we learned to sow and we were only halfway there. He put his hand on the arch of my back like a salsero. In snow-capped Norwalk he told me I didn't need a viejo. Luna called me a coqueta. I was a little hungry for cheese and ham. Luna said: "I have proscuitto at home."