FREEWRITE
Behind the sanatarium walls
kids all lined up for a communal light
during cigarette break.
The teacher is the dispenser of fire.
At Napa, there is a subculture
based on cigarettes.
I begin to understand
what my mother once said:
when she knew she was going mad,
the only thing she could relate to
was a cigarette. The smoke curled
from her nostrils like an angry dragon.
No one's allowed to have lighters
or their own matches here.
A human train of smoke and fire
weaves out of the room.
A conspiracy of tobacco.
6/30/1987, Napa
rev 9/2016
FREEWRITE
My students were born the year
I graduated from high school, 1970.
Are they products of the love-child generation?
I feel old. There's a 17-year gulf between us.
These kids don't know Kennedy or Vietnam.
Some of the girls I went to high school with
have children old enough to run away from home
or to wind up here in this sanitarium.
These kids, how long have they been here?
Most of them left home earlier than most,
These kids, how long have they been here?
Most of them left home earlier than most,
runaways, living on the streets, in gangs,
until their world caved. Then it became
juvenile hall, a ward of the state, lockdown.
The last stop in the juvenile court system.
Will they ever leave this place,
with its double locks, behind?
Others will graduate to prison.
Their conversations are littered with
When I get out... When I leave...
it is always in the present tense.
There is always hope.
Some manage to leave this place for a while.
Their successful matriculation
is measured in months.
Sometimes even in years,
if they're lucky enough.
6/30/1987, Napa
rev 9/2016
FREEWRITE
Limpear, to clean this blimp of earth
and the sunshine falling beneath the sky.
Oh heavens Spears! Milton's lost again
and we can't find the key.
I say, llave, in Spanish.
The car stalled and she's wearing
green spangles on her ears.
Someone tells me that the angels
are loose in the library again. Again.
And she's gone and left me alone again.
I could walk out, have a tantrum,
I could scream, do what they do.
Instead, I am writing as fast as I can.
All this music drips off the ceiling,
half notes looking for completion in the ear,
and my wrist wants reprieve.
6/30/1987, Napa
rev 9/2016
FREEWRITE
And the Arabs invented the idea
of absolute zero out of one.
They tied it up into knots
because the desert has so little water.
I'm looking for an oasis in the stars.
A black hole is like a binary skater who,
spinning with legs and arms akimbo,
suddenly tucks in close to her body,
and increases the drag and spin
until light can no longer escape.
6/30/1987, Napa
rev 9/2016
He who makes a revolution
in South America
is sowing the sea.
When it snows in La Paz,
the government will fall –
said the Bolivian tin miners.
INFLATION
Bolívar paying his hotel bills
with bricks of dollars in a handbag,
paper money by the pound.
Se me cayó, what I've lost
The multicolored balloons
along the Reforma—
marionettes dancing
mimicking the tourists.
6/30/1987, Napa
rev 9/2016
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