Thursday, October 31, 2013

The living blues

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I don't celebrate my dead
My dead celebrate me
My dead have a hard time being dead
(Just like sometimes I have a hard time being alive)
My dead love being alive
My living abhor death
Life banishes death
Death accepts life
My dead and living love each other
A clacking embrace of skeletal desires
We each practice sleeping without breathing
We each practice breathing without sleeping
We each practice holding each other
We lie and live in a bed of blues
The skin of dreams is black
Our words are our memory of the first kiss
Our lips glazed with blue rouge offering an eternal kiss
I honor my dead by staying alive beyond my means
I carry my dead
in my love,
in my hair,
in my eyes,
in the palms of my blood
I am my dead
I am alive through them
My dead sway in the maize stalks
My dead roll around in the dust and the rain and the mud
My dead flirt, fool around, make fun of the living, they say:
You haven't lived until you've died!



*

The Sonora desert
is the endless dust
of migrants
dead
of stars
banging out
of the walls of deception
Devotion
is the longest walk, the longest memory
of humanity
a milk way of blood and bleached skulls
to arrive in your prickly arms
Our dead
just want to get home
Our living
just want to become dirt again
What men think it strange and crazy
that our bodies feed verdant fields of dirt?
What men carry guns
to herd us into the rows?
What men have lost
their bearings
their roots
wearing nothing but our soil?
A migrant child wails into the stars
A migrant woman places her mouth over the land
A migrant man, made of soils, waters and winds
pauses
before becoming another plant in the sun ...