Roberto Tejada

Speaking Part

I leave something out    another form of refusal      the vacant field

arteries upright    the brittle deciduous branches

my hands so far in the foreground   cages and bleachers

shadow shape   in woodland green   awash in camouflage

pattern my twenty-first century combat desert fatigue     

was it Monsiváis who wondered whether

we understand the manifest to mean

not always in agreement      unlikely diagonals

at a distance    in middle gradations 

estimated time of arrival    for the descending sky

in softer assertion    where is the vanishing point

blue arrowhead maybe   of negative space  

in the cloud cover    freed from my speaking part

I spindle and chant    ash orioles of fire

face to face with my species   in thick motility

little vial of neurotoxins    tick ticking in the vault

now a whistle and bark     now the larynx

contracting my legacy of cruelty and kindness    

fourfold pattern  of my appearance   my ability

to oppose  the function of persons   in coherence

of a scene bursting  at the surface     I come close

except in passing am I brought to bear 

Impasse

On land inclined to ignite    I was given to wildfire

to night sweat    to ash-covered

clocks     incinerated

photographs.   I attended the wakeful

recital now  —triage   arrest  

distributive shock—  

in the scales I pursued

from the school of aftermath

and hearsay.

I amplified

my refutation of the number

for alarm    for the enabled

scenes of undeclared cargo   

rumored to be gold

in hours for the eldest   

and the undersigned.

 I found myself

disowned or missing among

the persons I berated

 but to whom I was beholden

relative to the sound

of something badly mired   at the far

end of my faculties

last brief leading        maybe already

led to the first abandon

and later admissions

in the years I delayed.

              Was I

an embarrassment or danger

with my emergent properties

at the impasse and subject now

to no other law but to name

the orphan counseled in my care

and when to play the ocarina?

Macula

Left-hand collision akin to the binary stars

from a neighboring galaxy.

Right-handed x and x I met my mother

plyometric in our belligerent alliance

our society of assault.  My father

heedless or headless but abracadabra

my optometry of sleep. Here is the handprint

and punishment when Jack be nimble

with my skin to the pledges of day in little

patches of sun a macula a monster.

I so delighted in cascades of light to counter

the Pleistocene age in fast-forwarding

tar pits   the hills   the hills   the alleyway

my newsprint corduroy and cottonmouth

when Friday morning air-raid sirens bellowed

and I am every one of us in single file.

I’m of the earth convulsing in hallucinated headlights

and I stay within the dotted lines

alone at the end of the asphalt and beyond

the palm tree and sycamore in

proximity of broken windows where I wonder

whether God is condemnation no matter

the saint for the sake of my error. I was already

lost to fortuitous speed and so prone to accident

in exultation ahead of the mastodon age because

I am falling now from a branch of the loquat. ~