The Man Who Will Watch My Car
I am going to pay a man
to stand by my car
and protect it
from the nomadic thieves
of the grid deserts,
the car I dreamed about
when I was a child
when I was unemployed
when I was weeping
in small painted rooms
with my hands in a ring.
But the man will be handsome
and my wife will begin to notice
his mountainous hands
his stoic postures
his black coffee
the outline of the gun
he bought with mercenary earnings
in a lush hotel room
in Athens or Istanbul.
In our narrow austere building
she will seek in the day
views and glances
that warm her tree of centers
as he stands not sweating
in the heat
we still bargain with.
And one day
when I have just stopped crushing an orange
I will hear her whimper
and the whimper
I will hear
all over my life,
a sonic marking
a final admission
and we both will know
but diagram our routines
and watch our glacial dances
turn the very life
we now detest.
And the whimper
will find a lost brother
in the persistent click
coming from the undercarriage
of my wheeled treasure
and my mechanic
will want me to help his son
in a business matter
seemingly drawn
by foaming mental defectives
in a room of one light
and snow.
And my boss,
a pale man who gnaws his upper lip,
will ask me obscene questions
about my car
and we will go on night rides
where he talks of his mistress,
the one who cannot
bear condoms,
and he will view his life
as a series of growing prisons
where every escape
is an entrance
and the pulse
from the birth of each streetlight
will make us slow
and melancholic
will make us remember
microwaved pizza
and adolescent loves
as bleedingmen
organize their trash.
The Rooms To Come
Whistling that comes down
the vertical corridor
along with a green olive
and a pink ball.
There is a perfect place
out by the archetype gas station
where an old man stands
in a puddle of flowers,
crying pink,
not far from the abandoned
drive-in movie screen
in invisible flames
in some perpetual dusk.
I find it
and stare at it
past what can be seen
and make myself
unable to be found,
shedding voices
and wandering
through some other city
vanished and serene,
touching the coins
on the table, on the wall unit,
becoming beyond real
and beyond imaginary.
Coughing and the infinite sneeze
and a troubled dog,
the incomprehensible tiendas
like the one with golden shoes.
The punks that lived
in the house they haunted
by the fruit stand
where my mother treated me
to Slim Jims.
And we all wondered
why I was so fat.
The drawer of expired condoms
on election day in Brazil,
the tissue box that says Elite,
the careful drawings
of nonexistent cities
I kept in a desk.
We live in the dreams
that we received
and changed
and dreamed again.
A rabid childhood collage
fed to a river
and collected in a distant sea
and eaten, now a psychotic,
and vomited
on the shore
where it is eaten
by a fawn
that we kill and devour
ten years later,
and in the feast
we are visited
by an exact copy
of the room we are now in
and a vision taste
of all rooms to come.
VAPORLANDS
Big sad South American cities
where there are sudden cuts of jungle
and the walls weep
and everything has been blasted
by the moisture
so there is tired mold and shadow
and the newer apartment buildings
look older and wiser
than any stone ruin.
São Paulo is the city
where people peer into
blackened windows
and in Da Nang
a child would always appear
to smile
and in Lisbon
it was the city of secret construction
or abandoned projects,
and through the empty windowframes
slanted wooden beams
were saved and exalted
by channels of sunlight.
We are given clues
to our own childhood—
a zen sandbox,
a recurring staircase—
working backward
to be born head out
in a white-tiled café
where the coffee is poured
from a strong kettle
whose scrollwork
has been partially erased
and the opera singer’s father
kept finding new women
even though the church
finally let him become
a Roman Catholic preacher.
The segments of digital numbers
float above your palm
free from their plastic houses,
the man will not be let back into the bar
and the shutter is already
halfclosed,
the astrologer in Medellín
keeps posting videos
and the more beautiful she becomes
the more she is talking
only to you.