Luis J. Rodriguez
My Name's Not Rodriguez
My name's not Rodriguez.
It is a sigh of climbing feet,
the lather of gold lust,
the slave masters religion
with crippled hands gripping greed's tail.
My name's not Rodriguez.
It's an Indian mother's noiseless cry,
a warrior's saliva on arrow tip, a jaguar's claw,
a woman's enticing contours on volcanic rock.
My real name's the ash of memory from burned trees.
It's the three-year-old child wandering in the plain
and shot by U.S. Calvary in the Sand Creek massacre.
I'm a Geronimo's yell into the canyons of the old ones.
I'm the Comanche scout; the Raramuri shaman
in soiled bandanna running in the wretched rain.
I'm called Rodriguez and my tears leave rivers of salt.
I'm Rodriguez and my skin dries on the bones.
I'm Rodriguez and a diseased laughter enters the pores.
I'm Rodriguez and my father's insanity
blocks every passageway,
scorching the walls of every dwelling.
My name's not Rodriguez; it's a fiber in the wind,
it's what oceans have immersed,
it's what's graceful and sublime over the top of peaks,
what grows red in desert sands.
It's the crawling life, the watery breaths between ledges.
It's taut drum and peyote dance.
It's the brew from fermented heartaches.
Don't call me Rodriguez unless you mean peon and sod carrier,
unless you mean slayer of truths and deep-sixer of hopes.
Unless you mean forget and then die.
My name_s the black-hooded 9mm-wielding child in all our alleys.
I'm death row monk. The eight-year-old gum seller
in city bars and taco shops.
I'm unlicensed, uninsured, unregulated, and unforgiven.
I'm free and therefore hungry.
Call me Rodriguez and bleed in shame.
Call me Rodriguez and forget your own name.
Call me Rodriguez and see if I whisper in your ear,
mouth stained with bitter wine.
#
Excerpts From "Notes of a Bald Cricket"
1.
I sit alone, a bald cricket, in a bar on 'poetry' night, face in a bottle,
singing the amber waves of beer. Poetry is the excuse,
as good as any. Be true to my art. But this is not what keeps
me here. It's the way tequila germinates inside like a gnarled tree,
the way bodies darken into a sort of sunken beauty,
lights low and voices high, the way I can swim between these
back-lit walls. There is death to meet us, swollen hands
to wake us, a life that is falling into the gaps in the floor under our feet.
There are levels of delusions not even churches can attain.
Alchemists straddle bar stools, transformers and transformed,
awaiting my arrival into their webs of splintered stories
while manacled to curled ghosts called gin. I want to trace
the lies on women's skins, to vanish in their wine-drenched
eyes. I want to be flute and whisper, pubic hair and cumshot,
to warrant enough attention so they try to run me over in their cars.
I pause between lingering words, imagining their flight above me,
words to pull into my mouth, to drown into a shot glass,
words of infinite pain, a pain without words; words that claw
at the ceiling, that cough up blood, words that vomit
out of me in back alleys beside rat shit and wet cardboard;
words that slap me silly, that want to rifle through a man's wallet
and slip a hand beneath a woman's skirt; words that eat tacos de pollo,
with extra-hot salsa, that play muffled trumpet into the reeking streets,
words to drown out the el train rumbling overhead, drowning out my words.
Crying can't speak. Tears only fall into empty palms. Tears & nights.
Night becomes the texture of memory, a humid breath glistening
perspiration on my forehead. Wandering from table to table,
my glass held unsteadily in my hand, I stave off hungers
even a double-champ cheeseburger with bacon cannot do.
Hungers for my friend's girlfriend, blue-eyed, dark-haired,
Polynesian-and-Irish, whose fingers I reach out for, whose hair
I want to shampoo, whose body I long to tread upon as if it were
autumn woods or a stretch of beach, with my toes deep into damp sand.
Every smile is a door, every glance a large bed to lay my head, a pillow
of eyelashes to soften the fall. Tequila, ron, blue whiskey for a blue
emotion. Mammary glands to memory glands. Each recalling a dij` vu
of startled intent. There are feels I always want to feel. There are voices
I would rip faded curtains to hear. There are faces to break
chrome-backed glass for, reflections of a liquid stare into millenniums
of stares. I'm dawdling on the edge of this sea in a glass, this last vestige
of my mother's fears, this grandfather poison that poisoned
my grandfather, this nectar of dried screams, this bruised cant,
this woman who presses her nipples to my cheek, whose chatter
cannot be climbed, whose kisses are stained lullabies, who tells me
I belong, although I cannot fit, who dares the fool's lament,
the call and response of night crawlers, the tones beneath my rambling,
who has become the last shriek of teguila dreaming,
whom I now grieve, ambling to the funeral tune of a child's cry
pulsing silent yet determined inside me.
O for beauty's fists to pommel this mask into itself,
for taste that is candy and not porcelain,
for wisps of saliva to wither on my hair and my chin,
for words to nuzzle and soak my tongue,
for language's naked prowlness to enter these shoes,
for a bald cricket's lyrical death on a dance floor.
5.
when the wasted poems become dawn and are not gray-speckled haze,
when the upholding structures collapse from their perjuries,
when the money-system no longer determines worth
and purgatory is no longer your driveway
when the factory-spawn stops lactating 'burbs,
whose milk is dioxin, drying up earth's blood,
when all value is inside of you,
when the wasteland's raped-terrain bursts green,
when the creative heart is the only blossoming.
7.
Wading through the lush of memory, through speechless seconds,
seeing myself on the backhand of past lives, crumbling emotions
surround me, as this obsessive and irresponsible poetry man beckons
to write. To tell truths. Oh such a liar. I'm a sleeveless
jacket in a closet of worn clothes; I'm the incision of scarring verbs
across the faces of all my loves. This Mexican who is a stranger in Mexico,
this pocho who hates milk with his coffee, juice with his vodka, who speaks
English with an East L.A. accent and Spanish with an East L.A. accent.
This Tarahumara's lost son, this graveled tongue, this ghost
beneath every ruin, rising like jaguar's breath in a tropical storm.
All sacrifices reside in me, all jagged chests, all virgin hosts,
with the wreckage of two massive oceans, all bloods commingling,
this Moor whose poetry stains the library walls, this armor-plated
mail-wearing, sword-thrusting, Andalusian who flew landward
through Iberian coasts and those of Cem-Anahuac.
I am Cortez's thigh, I am the African beard, I am the long course hair
of Chichimeca skulls. I am Xicano poet, a musician who can't play
music as a musician is a poet who works in another language.
There is a mixology of brews within me. I've tasted them all, still fermenting
as grass-high anxieties. I am rebel's pen, rebel's son,
father of revolution in verse. I am capitalism's angry Christ,
techno-Quetzalcoatl, toppling the temples
of modern thievery, of surplus value in word-art
exploited, anointed, and perhaps double-jointed.
There's a brown Goddess in my eye, a Guadalupana for the broken red
earth. The sacred is too sacred for walled cathedrals,
for incensed and baroque martyrs in vested garbs, for pulpit schemers
and sweat lodge fakers and garbled spirtualists on the best-selling lists.
I am disciple and elder. I am rockero and hip hop bandit,
rapping Aztlanese in-between brick-lined texts.
What do I know? What blazing knowledge can I spear?
Who can burn with me and not get burned?
Violence used to be great solace, alcohol my faithful collaborator, scratching
dank words from stale corners. Now there are whole cities in my gardens,
Azteca drums pulsing from my temples. Saxophone riffs streaming
from the sky like a waterfall into the canyons of my body.
Walls carry my name, walls and their luminant fractures.
Walk with me then. Walk with me to the Maya. Walk with me along headstones
of past loves, past plans, long-gone junctures. Walk with me through
the forest of collective remembering, shamed and honored by the trees.
I'm no immigrant. I belong because I belong. I'm no shaggy stranger.
I'm the holy villain, the outlawed saint,
the most Godless and therefore dearest to the mystery.
Where suicide is not solution. Where poems
No longer puncture the phantoms.
Where walking with me is to become brethren to rain
and night sweats and the betrayed.
this disjointed sneering
this lifting of cranial foam
this museum of oppressions
this waiting to be held, to be a musical note
this coursing through a rapture of voices
this clogged heart in the traffic of hearts
#
75 Years Exiled in the Country of Reason
(For American Revolutionary Nelson Peery on his 75th Birthday)
You have known roads as Langston remembers
rivers, as water flows through the cracked
earth, as the rust and dust settles into a steel mill's lament.
You have known roads, hoboing, then laying down bricks,
plumbing level the offices and homes of a brick-lined America.
Rain drenched, the roads stretch across the years.
Once you showed me the structures in New York City
that you mortared to life, and I thought about how
you also laid down stones for paths of learning,
paths of struggle , how you built a road inside me.
And the roads stretch on.
For more than 25 years, I have sought your counsel.
In you, dwell the graveled voices of a fractured century,
In you, echo the cries of hod carriers, mud mixers, melters and smelters,
In you, the song of resistance never dies,
In you, the sunlight behind the dark clouds of racial injustice breaks through,
In you, the callused palm heralding healing forms a firmer grip,
In you, the storms to quench the intractable fires of class warfare forever rages.
For 75 years you exiled yourself into the country of reason.
Here is where I have found residence:
In the road-stretched lines of your face,
in the father-love of your embrace,
while a world crumbles around its own madness,
and dwindles behind its calculated indignities
and tortured logics.
Here, next to you, where knowledge
is an exploding bullet, I found home.
You are my most enduring and endearing teacher.
So Nelson, as you looked into my suicide eyes so long ago,
as you found the life breaking out of this deadened soul,
as you took in this young slave and madman,
whose only vision came through the rifled bore of a gun,
you showed me this is not the way things have to be.
I believed because you believed.
Since then my life has been broken in two:
Before Nelson and after Nelson.
Since then I have tried and failed, oh so often,
to emulate your spirit, your ways of knowing,
your patience and poetry. I had no other way to go.
And our love is the love of the same thing,
the rule of the eyes, ideas, and visions
of this martyred truth: Things don't have to be this way.
Now I have discovered the courage within
my own courage, to trace the poetry you expressed
inside my own expression.
Everything you have learned, anyone can learn,
you always said. Slow down, think, study.
Don't die until you have something to live for.
You believe because I believe.
Twenty-five years ago, when we first met in a simple house
in the cauldron called Watts,
I handed myself over to revolution
and have bled blossoms ever since.
I gave myself over to justice
in the brick-walled imaginations that dared to dream
a different dream.
For this I thank you, Nelson,
from where the red flag unfurls
and the road stretches on.
#
My Nature Is Hunger
There were many Aztec feminine energies associated with earth and fertility. The main deity was known as Toci, but she was also called Tonantzin, Teteo Innan, Coatlicue, Cihuacoatl, Itzpapalotl, and Tlazolteotl. She was the great conceiver, the principle behind regeneration, birth and rebirth. She was also represented as the opposite concepts of decay and death, the taker of life ; from the earth, to the earth. In one of her many manifestations, this power was known as Tlaltecuhtli, a frog-like earth monster with many eyes and many mouths at her joints. In this aspect, her nature was hunger, a devouring deity, eater of hearts and of souls.
Anyway, don't come close.
I'm not harmless. I'm the ground swallowing.
I'm grass of thorns, insatiable dirt,
with green claws of vines and shrubbery.
My moss-furred tongue pulls you into entrails of roots and seeds.
I'm gaping petals like slimy smiles,
taking you in, deeper and tighter,
filling me with a phallic spear of flesh.
My many mouths are many cervixes.
My corpse is a garden, covered in earth skin
with toes as mountains, a terrain of stone eyes
and watery grimaces. Enter here and die.
Leave and be born.
Every burrow, every crevice, every dank cave,
is an eternal vagina that sucks, shapes and also shuns.
Outside me burst new life. Inside, a smothering death.
Out of my severed body, the world has bloomed.
Man of woman. Woman of woman.
So come, and get folded
by these coral fingers,
into my arms made of forests,
nuzzled by the music of my breath.
My eyes open toward the sky, where man and woman
eclipse into god, and a priest, in someone else's skin,
opens you up to be taken by me ; fearful Mother, terrible Mother,
nurturer that caresses you,
and with a blink, shreds your flesh beneath moonless night.
#
