Self-Portrait as Desert
by Rodney GomezIs there a song
for recovery
that doesn’t also
sting? That straightens
the coat hanger
called violence?
You ask for water
but I have none
to pour you.
I strike an altar
with melted candles.
Saint Martin de Porres
wears a blast crater
in his heart.
All I know by this time
is how bullets
cannot possibly feed
a collapsar.
Yet I use them
to sustain
and underwrite
my grief.
*
Tonight I bury myself
the same as any other night.
First a tumbledown
quilt with lace hemming.
Then glass which resists
secrets.The ease
with which a gun
shapes itself into a broom
in my palm, how it dissolves
what I never was.
I use ghosts
as inhibition
to pixelate the landscape.
Underground,
I make passionate love
to my previous molts.
Will I recover the old me,
the one who didn’t ache
after every annihilation?
The one who didn’t say
I would be better off
never having arrived?
*
Good-bye, ghost.
Good-bye, fat lip.
I suppose I am turning
into my father.
Just today I barked
an order into dawn
and it went right back
to sleep.
No more family
and their Naugahyde
patience. No more
novelty of falling hair.
Is there a way
to recover the weather vane
I once was, scrape it
clean of rust,
start it up again
like a windup doll?
Is there a way
to vanquish
the tyrant
of the interior?
I am not a romantic
about pain. I wear it
rebozo. I wear it
loose like the hand’s bones
around my throat.
*
When I die, discard
my razors and hide
a lantern in my coffin.
Why is every animal a fuse?
Why will every man
invariably try to annihilate
another?The voice
staked into the ground
begs to be finally let out.
Before I knew the knife
I knew the need,
a prow parting skin.
Then I spilled my body
on linoleum, holding
my hands up like a stab.
A wave wearing away rock
at the edge of a creek.
An excuse
for the eventual expulsion
of the alien body.
