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Luis H. Francia
NIGHTMARE ON MAIN STREET
Last night the television switched us on and
watched and watched and watched.
Detergent popped into my hands, and in a flash the kitchen sparkled
like
Xanadu even as a decorator rendered our place
a glorious palace.
My wife and I jumped into a plush car we never knew we had, and an
adorable dog from nowhere came along for the ride.
We zipped through mountains and deserts, fording raging rivers
easily,
then came to the edge of a lovely green pasture.
The trees and sky were perfect, the men and women were perfect who
ran up to us, with bottles they drank from as they dazzled us with
their teeth.
We too drank from their brew and voila! our bodies grew younger, the
wind no longer messed our silky hair as we danced with
abandon with the perfect men and women who never once were out of
breath.
My skin turned fair, my eyes blue, my jaw squared, my height and
build
that of a linebacker. My wife emerged a blonde, brighter than
the sun, and Dallas cheerleaders had nothing on her figure.
And then the television switched us off.
My wife and I looked at one another, at the untidy kitchen and the
faded
living room, at our middle-aged bodies, at the blemishes on the
walls as the
perfect men and women faded into the gloom.
The next day we filed for divorce, and I shot
the dog, our neighbors’, it turned out.
I shot them, too.
IN ORDER TO SAVE YOU WE MUST KILL YOU
Things are revealed in precincts and heard,
whispered and seen in hallways and basements,
bruited about on elegant avenues I daily cross,
that Death will come dressed as a reasonable argument
With a warrant for my permanent arrest.
Concerning my scarred omniscience astounded
by fate, devout and ominous, what
citizen of the white world will believe me
Who believe in no god?
So many of god’s citadels hideous and squat,
Their spires, naves, minarets, and domes
Are gun turrets, their pulpits, forts, their crucifixes,
Crescents, and stars are murderous axes, and
every prayer, every hymn is one dream
less to achieve, one more for
the maw of a salivating deity.
Each says, worship only our Father and no other.
Rather, say I, do not worship.
Blasphemer! Infidel! they hiss.
Oh to merely survive is not bliss,
How far we are from peace!
And the justification for the
Century’s benedictions of fire?
That my point of view be obsolete forever.
FOR THE LOVERS IN FALLUJA
and the red flees for the sea
and the corner with its back against the
pockmarked wall cries out to the coroner
in the hall, there’s a dead girl in my arms,
whose singing was her glory and her charm.
and the sleuth asked, which way, of the door
that swung both ways against the uproar
of the furniture tearing up the floor, in
protest against the dead, against the pale
grey and the color of lead and the red that
flees for the sea, and the girl’s wounded lover,
the two no longer turning in their mutual
yearning, for one is dead and the other dying,
dead and dying on account of a
country they knew nothing about.
which way did their young hopes go
devoid now of the red, what sort of dread
did they know, which dreams did they let go?
an open and shut case, said the door to
the hall, said the wall to the floor, said the
grieving mothers to the earth, whispering, to
hold them where no government can touch
them, exiles from themselves.
In cities of the dust neither bullet nor
ballot matters, nor muezzin call, for
in the democracy of the grave
can they now being full citizens
raise the flag of their love
even as the red flees forever for the sea
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
She wants you for the coconuts and rum inside you.
She wants you for a whirlwind trip to the South China Sea.
She wants you for the typhoon in your hair
And the
bright fish of your sperm.
She wants you for vacations she can never take
To places she
can never imagine.
She wants you for the sun in your kisses
For the drummer under your tongue
For the volcano in your blood.
She wants you for the genie that
She believes is inside you, that can
Break her every taboo.
She wants you for the you you
Never knew
was you,
For the you you need to die for
Before you will ever be you.
INGRID’S ELEGY
Was it hope or despair
That drove me to Tito’s?
What was in the air that
Led me to el chiringuito*?
Was it love of e-mail or
The e-mail of love?
(mail to female, mail to male …)
Was it Italian Walter or Pavel,
Dreamy, of the Czech Republic?
Was it Lito nunca nunca nunca
Of Andalucia?
At the seashore bar the Internet
Is my anchor and my net
And drinking my jugo I contemplate
my juego I go
Eugene and Luis and Suki go
Down to the sands
To watch the waves wash away
These last days of summer
But not before I wink at
Walter, wave at Pavel,
Ignore Lito
Nunca nunca nunca Tito’s
And all the useless hombres
Of el chiringuito
*a beachfront bar/ Mojacar, Spain
THE COCKTAIL HOUR
I may think of mermaids and acrobats and
disappeared worlds, build a fabulist
city in my dreams.
I may sit at some cafÈ, asking,
Do I live or die on my own?
I might ask myself,
“Do I dare, do I dare, and
what shall come of this?”
But there is nothing more to do
except endlessly revise, place one
word, one act, after another, drawing
from the vocabulary of days and
nights gone by, a life and
work played by ear, remembering
how each time the moment clicked,
the universe fell into place
and my skin felt right.
I need the grace of your company then,
to break bread with me as
My heart runs through a field of
Broken glass, seeking redemption
In the wounds I leave behind
In the blood that spirals from the page
In the lives and deaths I
orchestrate in black and white.
Spectators sit on the edge of the
century never knowing, never asking,
my requirements, that I, comic of innocence,
demand an apocalypse clean enough to know
where the bodies fall, what will rot and what will not,
to gift me with vanity enough to give the gaunt,
the worn, the cold fields of winter the slip.
There is nowhere I would rather end than at
a bar on a beach somewhere, cozying up to
you, having nectar poured into my drink
by a bartender who happens to be god
and who lights up my cigar before it explodes
© Luis H.
Francia 2007 |
