HARKEN! ENDLESS POXES

HARKEN! ENDLESS POXES


Lewd calls from debt
collectors in the morning
sound like surly birds
in wampumdumpsters.

Aren't debt collectors just so smug
with your account innards on their screens?

Querying you on how you disburse
your sesame sums? Asking you for your
treasured sequences?

The nerve, the unfettered nerve,
of diluting my morning with such assclownery,
such premeditated, yet disjointed, ire arousal.

I would like to speak to a supervisor
and take my name off the Shitkicker Index
except when I answer, it automatically cues
to parlare with debt wraith from the Gobi

who I know full well pushes a black Navigator
with illegal tints as a statement on the illegitimacy of taste
who bluetooths through lunch hour on the deadbeat
treadmill and liquidates customer clusters during barre

My dear sirs/madams, the phone is not indeed
a fuchsia vibrator to be ribbed or unribbed
at your disposition! I have willfully engaged
in a see-saw of usury with you, this much is true.

But, this does not mean I must respect your
threshold for insubordination, or privilege
you pricks speaking ill of my icerberg.

OLD REJECTION SLIP FROM UGLY DUCKLING

LIBRARIAN'S SOLILOQUY

I push a beat-up, 22-year-old Volvo through the streets of South Los Angeles. I am on way to a school or Family Source Center or Boys and Girls Club or Opportunity High School. I am packing a digital projector, generic computer tablet, and eight foot of extension cord. My flash drive (4 Gigs) weighs a ton (as does my Uzi).

Once there, I set up my shit, get into facilitator mode. I pass around a sheet (which artifacts the data I use to justify my existence) and/or pamphlets & literature for an array of programs. The seats slowly fill up with parents or administrators (real municipal hard-ons) and I try to light up the room like a Philippino Catherine Wheel.

Patrons: there are great streams of free available to thee, from sea to shining sea, in these United States of Green. Our decree is simple: Literacy for all. Our mission replete with the glut of centuries. Patrons: we move against the toxins of ignorance, against the impediments of equality. We believe in the right to education, political history, the protocols of democracy.

We believe in books, but not in legislating how they should be read. We believe in readers trafficking books and those supporting software. We believe the library is a community space and a spatial imperatrive. You should have the right to stretch out and take any book off the shelf and find an empty seat and launch yourself into a shallow orbit of occipital brain fireworks.

We reserve the right for you to disappear in the words of another person.

FINALIST TIP

My ms. is a finalist for the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize @ University of Notre Dame Press. I feel very fortunate to be competing against some of the best Latino Poets currently writing in the U.S. right now, http://latinopoetryreview.blogspot.com

RECENT POSTCARDS

The postcard of the medieval dame with headgear is from my illustrious Poetry Editor, Jim Heavily. The postcard of the Florida panther is from Karen Ristow, the mother of a great friend of mine. I just wanted to mash these postcards up and thank these senders with an individual aside praising their assiduousness.

Thank You/Gracias!