Beyond the Algorithm: Creative Expression in Verse
On West Main, near a church
my dad decides to be straight with me.
“You get real tired of the same meat,
of the same stinking bed.”
His eyes are dim gray,
his mouth twisting sadness by butter knives.
From Mexico City to Chicago,
he tuned-up old trucks, changed tires,
traced electrical shorts:
the process of making due.
“You were a mistake but I stayed.”
Flies crawl his arm,
the sun flares behind trees,
and I stare deep into stream
of glass yawning in angled light.
He says goodbye;
“Ya no pedo. Ya no pedo.”
I step out, dust dances in gold waves,
the engine roars thick as metal,
and along the curb, I kick cans
under clouds giving up
and trees pointing to a new home.
First published @ https://www.eclectica.org/v4n4/ortiz.html
“Rumspringa”
for Lucy Walker
He spears into a world of trailer parks
and bonfires burning in glassy eyes
of teenagers who chain-smoke scripture
into bitter ash. Bottles of rum, vodka
and Southern Comfort stack shelves
like trumpets for the dead. Back home
in Indiana, he thinks of parents in horse
-buggies, in carriages drawn in early mist.
He thinks of the simple life, of the fan-shaped
beards, of the quiet night sky. Posters of Tupac
spatter the walls, a television plugged
into a battery. He is lost in the
wilderness of keg-parties.
In the beer-colored night
God speaks in one ear, Satan in the other.
He looks to the pasture, reaches out through
the thin curtains to crown himself king
of a paradise of forklifts and fireflies.
*Photo courtesy Don Solo.
First published @https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/rumspringa/
“MATEO”
They pronounced your death on voicemail
They took your children away
They fed you syringes filled with angry junk
Curled spoons you heated
On wintry midnights
They shackled you to backyard porches
They broke you under an ellipsis of stars
They sold you to the calculus of need
They dragged you through filthy ditches
They branded you
They shamed you
They swelled your veins into a network of slums
Your eyes once crimson and brilliant
Like gilded narcotics
Your smiles once twisted and meandering
Like wild foliage
Only to become weights of whelps
Hung heavy on your face
They flogged you with silence
So you could scream for them
They pointed with pride
To the alleys you haunted for them
They put dime bags in your hands
So you could long for them
What from the neighborhood where they’ve made you
What from the world they’ve coaxed from you
What angers them
Making them resentful, vicious
What panics them
Into seizures of woozy clouds
Today they shout curses at you
But I only hear your long, retreating
Breath
So ashamed, so beautiful, so lost
Your burdened voice
Clashing against blunt shingles of the night
First published @ https://www.glass-poetry.com/volume-one/issue-three/ortiz-mateo.html
