V
Years pass.
Cattle cars in the downtown freightyard
squeal and groan, and sizzling grills
steam the Barelas Coffee House cafe windows,
as the railroad workers with tin hard hats
stop for coffee, hours of dawn
softly click on grandfather's gold pocket watches
in Louey's Broadway Pawnshop, hocked
to get a cousin or brother out of jail
City workers' tin carts and long-handled dust pans
clatter in curb gutters
as buses spew smoldering exhaust as they stop beneath
Walgreen's neon liquor sign.
I lean against an office building brick wall,
nothing to do, no where to go,
comb my hair in the blue tinted office windows,
see my reflection in the glinting chromed cars,
on a corner, beneath a smoking red traffic light,
I live-
blue beanie cap snug over my ears
down to my brow,
in wide bottomed jean pants trimmed with red braid,
I start my daily walk,
to the Old Town Post Office,
condemned Armijo school building,
Rio Grande playa,
ditches and underpasses-
de-tribalized Apache
entangled in the rusty barbwire of a society I do not understand,
Mejicano blood in me spattering like runoff water
from a roof canale, glistening over the lives
who lived before me, like rain over mounds of broken pottery,
each day backfills with brown dirt of my dreams.
I lived in the streets,
slept at friends' houses, spooned
pozole and wiped up the last frijoles with tortilla
from my plate. Each day
my hands hurt for something to have,
and a voice in me yearned to sing,
and my body wanted to shed the gray skin of streets,
like a snake that grew wings-
I wished I had had a chance to be a little boy,
and wished a girl had loved me,
and wished I had a family-but these
were silver inlaid pieces of another man's life,
whose destiny fountained over stones and ivy
of the courtyard in a fairytale.
Each night I could hear the silver whittling blade
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poem by Jimmy Santiago Baca
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