Saturday writing typed today
COPY one File and write the next one, changing the date.
three or four blocks through my neighborhod, our neighborhood, este modulo de nueva Tijuana enseguida de la puerta Otay colonia, this module of New Tijuana next door to the Otay border gate neighborhood of typical narrow streets narrow sidewalks in front of front yards all gated and walled with cement block, metal bars, ornamental wrought iron
neighborhood of planned design, new city blocks nueva Tijuana modules all right angles, square corners, manzanas rectangulares rectangular city blocks pero unas calles some streets don't go through, only make the corner and stop at T-intersection, not X, and The Plan is thus like a slightly uneven stack of offskew dominoes here and there pedestrian passageways cutting through from one street
the boys who grew up here warned me not to come home at night from the east.
last night a big dog barked at me angry. I wonder if I woke him up.
this is a page, a brief echo
a moment I remember you
you re3e$mer me
re threes mhyrr meeeeee
remember
the vision of that young couple delicately sharing a meal at a taquito quesadilla stand in the street market sobreruedas side by side, arms grazing closer than any tented stall more intimate even their first child only beginning to show in her barely swelling belly awakening an ancient belief, mother, that yes there be tomorrow . ............................... ................. ...... .In Tijuana did government
a stately border gate decree
where long-range trucks and highways ran
from caverns measureless to man
into the sea...
with apologies to Colleridge in the distance you can always hear the trucks growling somewhere
and sometimes, late at night, the sky is tinted by huge plumes of vapor
that rise up from the cryogenic plant
DON'T ASK what is it, Elliot visit
...they were overjoyed when the first plane hit
the buildings, so I told them be patient.[- binLauden / Pentagon Tape, 2001 -]
...the only thing we have to fear is... fear itself;
nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.[- Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1933 -]
we have found our new global enemy
and I
don't mean
marxism that ain't
worthless enough any more
no, new enemy number one is good old kill you for the halibut
terror i s m
I will not rest, he says, taking a movie vacation
I will not shirk, he remembers
and lives to leave peacefully
at the end of his days on job.
godverymuchblessedamericawithriches and goodrugrats .
______________________________________________________________
congrats on that
my brother this
and sister is leaping toward birthday
parties between the many
different
lives
w e a r e a l l o n e
some-body spelled the word .
some things are true in each and every country
this Mexico is a land of family values
meanwhile no where nowhere they are debating the arrival of the pope (FICTION) meanwhile the politicians paint their names on mountain t o p s and your guess is as good as mine what is prose and what is verse Williams puts all to rest for me when read him particularly if I forget to code the line breaks and it turns into nothing but poemic prose trash invented word poemic Calangeles Calangel in Calengel did stupid poems a great big email page decree where spam the ugly bridge troll ran and dunked his bearded head for free poemics is a word I first thought about ten years ago. reading etic and emic stuff. reinforced slugging my way through quetzil's observations on chichen itza, the big tourist machine made me think about Tijuana eight years later now plus or minus and you get the millennium on my border of time between youth and old age son in college, myself in and out of jobs poor struggling artist who discovered electronic paper and you know Calangeles" he said, claiming to have invented that word, too. Back in the 1970s making utterly ko no known knocked out subject to do with the other spinning off my reading about Califas and Calafia and California and seeing them on the street driving around like little burros burritos these little zebra words el burro is the big bus, technically, formally, originally or maybe it was any bus, maybe it was even called long ago a diligencia stage coach yes the car el carro the train wagon el vagon del tren the wagon el vagon
...one does hear so many awful things that I do not know why that should have been so shocking but it was and there is no doubt about it one's country is one's country and that kind of harm seems to be so far away from our country. It is queer the world is so small and so knocked about. To-night we expected to have Germans come into the house again....
...one does hear so many awful things that I do not know why that should have been so shocking but it was and there is no doubt about it one's country is one's country and that kind of harm seems to be so far away from our country. It is queer the world is so small and so knocked about. To-night we expected to have Germans come into the house again....[- Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen, 1944 -] [- Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen, 1944 -]this is a civilization built on business and trade this is America north, south, central all countries and both continents this new world grown out of the conquest 500 years ago into another civilization of mixture and more mixture every flavor of europe laid down into the brown resulting in all tastes from India, China, Africa, Asia and Europe come together against an older word that got called Indian but wasn't in India it was ancient America turtle monster land some say others say center land or water land or eagle it seems to my imaging memories of endless books and endless conversations with people from different parts of our this that your world. We all have some basic things in common. Sleep. Food. Love. Language is in all its forms and shapes and powers to open and to understand. God is merciful and good and this world is blessed with life. What shall we make of it? Destroy its living animals and plants to feed our superworld economy? Time has not run out yet. It seems time is all ways and always trying to run out on these crises of overpopulation, nuclear war, global warming, ice age dangers, all my life the world has echoed with our propaganda cry, Jeremiah against the hypocrites and idol-worshipers ahem. But it is pointless because the world is always the same, and only God knows and wants when to make it better, leaving it up to us the caretakers of this planet to live responsibly ahem and that is that, dear friends and all fellow creatures all ships at sea and seconds on the clock tick tick by b y e this is the shadow the footstep on one man thinking word and another, or another woman, reading her or his answer to what said this one here . that is "poetic" bla bla bla analIsis that is my poor version of poetics when all I really wanted was to invent poemics but turns of a word two ways are just another very, very old game and I thank you masters of grandmother language, for inventing these mother tongues we all speak, all human cultures make bla bla babel to share, together, the separate realities of each individual unit whether these units be individual beings and also groupings of beings in associate circles of shared boys and girls it is time to sit in the circle again time to become good and learn how to be real and listen to the old, old stories and hear about the new, new story and all the million thousand hundred billion variations of your kinder garden of kindergarten y e s time for a nap, Christopher Robin. The monsters from Hollywood horror films will not disturb you after your milk and cracker. only wake up and walk with me in the morning eyes yes open yesterday, from home to the border gate
through these three, four blocks of our/my neighborhood after kissing my love goodbye until last night, then the first step through this modulo of residential streets all tightly bound and constricted between rich and poor houses
and barking dogs
until we reach the boundary street of our neighborhood (sor Juana) and enter the actual
border zone itself,
THERE IS IT there it is
all open fences and truck lots and the big BORDERGATE street itself
full of honking cars lined up workday morning thousands upon hundreds waiting to enter the
United States of America. On this side of that frozen boulevard, one long sidewalk leads toward "our"
(u.s.) economic paradise behind new Berlin China wall of steel and fear and......
Puerta Otay gate is different than
from San Ysidro's puerta Mexico).
Everything is not jammed up against the line, here everything was
"planned" and so there are huge, spacious stretches of what looks like a
wasteland full of trucks and cars and lots of lots of dirt and dust. And
fences. Did I forget to mention fences and more fences? Yes. Fences.
Broken sidewalks. Dirt.
We have left the houses now. There is no turning back. I am going to work on the other side. Good little Tijuana gringo. Go to work.
People are parking their cars in makeshift lots in front of & beside the last houses on the last corner of "my" neighborhood DON'T ASK me I JUST LIVE HERE and then they walk across, too....
At this last corner, between my neighborhood and no man's land tierra de nadie, here, next to where the lunch wagon parks, there, behind a fence and gate, exists a curiously beautiful apparently official Mexican building - a building almost done in seemingly Franklloydwright prairie style...
Passing by by and by I buy a cup of coffee from that
Mexican lunch truck parked, waiting upon all
the pedestrians who walk past and beyond
all day long toward the legal door to the other
side. Ten pesos - ninety cents - a bit
steep price for a cup of coffee but
we are almost a captive market of
sorts, we pedestrians walking toward
"America"
(
we are already on the same
continent, under the same California sky
and bla bla bla political there is no such thing
as free access between NATIONS everything
is ConTrolled with a big Big D as in
Dellortnoc Pallindrome I am writing
I have my own border inside my head, my
heart, I mean I physically am able to
say anything I want to but self-edit
WE PAUSE FOR A BRIEF EDITORIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
t h a n k y o u - t h e management
against slander and libel etc. yes,
since this is More than writing, 'tis
free publishing and one can Never escape
Responsibility, No. There is No Fire
in this theater, Holmes. And there, friends,
is the Yes Border Gate of My Mind, No.
Those other words are deported into
hell, like the three devils I once
commanded to consume themselves from
their tails right up into their
heads and poof! Those bad little words
ate themselves out of existence,
went off into another dimension....
frack shut cokesipper where gosh darn mother
) Yes. Erasing curses at the wall who divides our beautiful California I stop to buy a cup of coffee buenos dias que le vaya bien gracias igualmente and then walk slowly slowly up the long sidewalk, sipping and scribbling only a note or two, only a word or two that will later expand like cancer cells into entire paragraphs of mutant language KILL IT quick CHEMO Radiation chyrugerie (cirujia) [surgery] no, no, no, digress to just walk slowly through this storm of thought, slowly, up the long pedestrian Otay sidewalk toward the gate, sipping off my white styofoam cup instant coffee you mix I mixed to your own desired strength, with hot water i m p r e g n a t e d with the sweet savour of cinnamon ("canela") t r a n q u i l o tranquilo don't want to go into the border gate building with a cup of coffee no
finish it first walking up that long l o n g s i d e walk take my time, walk slowly, sipping
On your left, as you stroll up the last sidewalk, lanes and lanes of backed up lefthand cars and vans and pickups mass together in crowded crowded lanes of of of traffic traffic frozen stiff with hot motors crawling forward slowly slowly while we pedestrians walk much more quickly there are very few foot crossers at Otay gate it is the secret both hard to find and difficult to approach
(big commercial trucks enter by another gate next door behind the walls)
([you can hear them growling and honking])
the vendors are already out in force, working their captive audience, wandering through the lanes of stopped cars, selling food, souvenirs, newspapers, etc.
Keep walking. You're getting closer now. Across the traffic lanes, on the left, you can see the Mexican customs buildings with their metal awnings and flags. Over here comes a change in the pavement of the sidewalk, a passing corner of a fence, that seems to appear and then disappear in one eye blink behind the last lady with her table of sweets and snacks, then, there it is, invisible, unmarked, yet signalled by change... you have crossed over and entered the entrance patio toward the glass doors. A huge sculpture of giants dancing el jarabe traditional dance, a set of flagpoles, and a stone tablet bearing the name of Ronald Reagan and the date 1985.
Walk up to the glass doors. Wait your turn. What is your citizenship? Where were you born? What are you bringing back from Mexico?
no apo strophe re member
okei bai okay bye
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copyright 2004 daniel charles thomas