I will be there with some other family.  Back and forth across the border I dip and pivot me

I used to have a tia Juana, an aunt Jane.  My father's sister.  She would be Michael's great aunt if he were existant other than thought.  But we hardly knew her.  My cousin called week before last to say her mother had had a stroke and then... a day later she called again with the passing.

I scarcely knew her.  All those years growing up on the California border, my tia Jane was a complete unknown, back east somewhere...  For almost thirty years she and my father never spoke except shortly before my father died.  My cousin Pam said to my mom, last week, that no one ever really knew her mother.  I say modern white anglo-saxon protestant tragedy all those years of not.  Well.  I won't tell you what my mother says about her (now) late sister-in-law.  She didn't know her, and so her opinion, usually more valuable to me, is here worth little.  Sorry Mom but them's the facts, Ma'am.  Sergeant Friday couldn't do no better.  (If She Ever Reads tHiS she will kill me ReTiReD EnGlisH teacher, you see, yes.)

SO... odd fact that Michael and I used to have our own "tia Juana" Aunt Jane.  I only saw her face to face Once In My Life that I can recall.  And we spoke maybe twice on the telephone long distance.

She had a stroke two weeks ago and passed away a couple days later.  If I do the math right she would have been ninety next year.  I know some of her children.  It was my cousin Pam who called to let us know.

My cousin once laughed fifteen years ago and asked me did I know she and her sisters and brothers grew up in an insane asylum?  She was not Speaking Figuratively.  No.  She meant it literally.  Well... well, you see my aunt Juana's second husband and his mother ran Blythewood a sanitarium and "drying-out" farm for alcoholics up in Greenwich Connecticut.  After the old lady Wiley died, they eventually were forced to sell the place for inheritance taxes -- or at least that was my impression, but I hardly knew my aunt, so....  So anyway when my cousin told me insane asylum I pictured dipsomaniacs under delirium tremens hallucinations tied to their beds and howling something like my father when he broke my nose the last time I agreed to babysit him while he got stinking drunk.

My tia Juana was addicted to art and writing, like me, they tell me.  Maybe that's why I am getting some static from various and sundry round about now.  They see me heading down the same path and I am.  You know I love these letters and words and text almost more than life itself.  Or why do I keep smoking?  Cigarette fuming in the ashtray at the punktecno internet cafe on Fourth a half block down from the park.  Or in the gardens of el lugar del nopal while I wait for English students who still don't come (but we have only started: here's the official schedule).  Or recent days outside the parents' house smoking on the deck above La Jolla when the sun sets fat and orange red into the hazy Pacific dark.  I am there in each place right now because these words tell you so.

I already told Ramón I am moving.  He took it rather well.  Only called me fat phucking filthy a$$hole once (well, twice, and it was ReAllY about SoMethinG ElsE).

not apo strophe remember

in the morning 
cleaning up after the new dogs
I think I shall never write poetry

that does not stink
does not smell
not reek

que no apesta de mi personalidad
blanda como queso americano
simple como hamburguesa
cliché mccoñolds

pero ni modo
así soy

adicto de garabatear
so here we are

and if any reader follow
mis cambios

entre codex +                pues más te vale
                             lector        querido

If you cross the line, can you still
dot your teeth?

Will any jots or tittles ever
strike out --
                              or am I too
                              base to even write
it
down ?                        Balls .

Does this ink stink more when you read
it             or when
     you            smell it
in the printing room air
or
     taste it
               smeared
               on your finger...
or... or:
or when I think it
bla bla bla
                              brain .        Yes .

KLIK MI FA SO LA TI MAUS

MICHAEL says :

in the light of sunset
behind the hill

my back door sees laundry
and gardens

of this old border town

everything used to be ranch land
all around here

vaquero cowboys rode
across this range

cattle found their
lonely salt licks

in these valleys between the ocean
and mountain winter snow

this monster city later
exploded to grow

one century, then another
after

that                          this

new endless mess massing streets and canyons those
right angles on mesa tops and valley bottoms bent around their mirror corners
corners mirror there, around bent bottom valleys and atop mesas no angles right nor left

these partings of ways and joinings of caminos
                              rampas leading up and down
                                                  into parallel universe 
                                                       neighborhoods
beyond the  power   of     any       text           c o l o n i a s
to
     m_e_a_s_u_r_e
                         o r
                                   d . e . s . c . r . i . b . e

                                                       except  to  say  delicious

                                                            tacos & beer

                                                            e  v  e  r  y  w  h  e  r  e