I see a flock of birds wheeling
over Santa Cecilia plaza
dark grey deltas bending
all in a cloudy row
above
red and yellow painted
cement two, three stories
I could kick myself for
not having a camera
Preacher by Michael Arthur Thomas
There comes a time when I am so f'ing tired of writing I don't even want to put down a margin line on paper, or I can't even stand to Sit ONE INSTANT More at the computer typing typing typing words and HTML code full of errors and depreciated tags, so I get up, go outdoors, and run into a local street preacher I have come to know here.
He babbles at me in Spanish -- even though his English is pretty good, he knows I don't want to speak it with him, I am here in Tijuana to learn more del idioma mexicano pues y no quiero hablar inglés and so he babbles rapid fire Spanish laced with heavy Biblical references (a book, or rather set of books, I have always enjoyed reading especially when some woman pounds a nail through the head of some evil king or another ooooo that's gross, or when King David sees Bathsheba taking a bath on the roof of her house and mmmm Man IS That Babe HOT! so he kills her husband and takes the woman and that, my friends, was how great and mighty Solomon the Wise was born, yes....)
Where were we? Oh yes, the street preacher babbles at me and I somehow manage to understand him maybe because he's got a California accent yes you guessed it my friends out there at the end of this network, you guessed it, the U.S. threw him out deported they do that a lot. We do that a lot, I should say paisán because in spite of everything he still loves America I mean the United States of, this castout street preacher still loves the U.S. because it is so d'd Protestant yes omaigad politics makes straaaaaange bedfellows no?
So anyway he talks quite a bit in run-on sentences like Dano and I like to write, maybe that's why I like to listen to him, but sometimes it gets too much and I feel like I don't even have a chance to convince him of ANY Liberal Theology and then I just don't even want to put down the margin line on paper ever again or to type no even one more character nor certainly any other pages at all At All AT ALL NOOOOOOOOOOO anyway no.
he told me more stories today which was yesterday to you will read it tomorrow, yes? Yes. He told me more stories fit for run-on sentences of tales without tails wagging the dog nothing but a game literature letters is/are and I finally said to him, after he asked me, that I should not go preaching with him on the street because the government would throw me out of Mexico. Now, of course, later, writing, I reflect that this is a reason why I should go get a visa to work as an artist. I mean maybe my cousin Danial wants to hole up in his room and scribble scribble scribble but I definitely HAVE to get out and I aint gonna sit around waiting for him to get a stick on the horse or a carrot for the burro, no, que burro how boring. I AM going to m a k e performance art on the streets with . . .
"Look, Miguel," the preacher said to me, "I was preaching on a corner in downtown Los Angeles last year, when two policemen came up to me and said come with us to another corner and we went and they said here -- we have to go away and we want you to preach here, right here on this corner, until we come back, okay? So I did. And they went away. And I began to preach. And then I saw a vision of the four living creatures on a chariot of fire hovering far away down at the end of the street, and it became a bus as it got nearer to me, and it stopped at the stop near that corner where I was preaching. A man got off, looked at me, and then sat down on the bus stop bench. And pretty soon I saw one, two, three, seven, thirteen, a whole mountain of young kids coming to buy drugs from that man on the bus stop bench. But my preaching frightened them and one after another group after group they turned and went away and finally the drug dealer at the bus stop shook his head at me, and then stood up and shook his fist at me, and finally another bus came and he got onboard and so he went away, too. Later that day the police came back and thanked me. ¿You see? They had to be somewhere else and I was able to preach against the devil's own work, right there on the front lines of empire, your empire, gringo, right there on that corner in the city of Lost Angeles, while they were gone. I don't think they were really policemen. They were angels in disguise, yes. **sigh** -- but that drug dealer and people like him have some kind of contacts inside government, inside the immigration department, and I think that is why they... well, you know. My whole family is over there, but me... but I... a m h e r e ."