fall 1993

the word writ/the writ word

There is at the moment a chill in the air, it cuts deftly to the marrow-bone. I feel wintry promises of blanched visions to come. A frozen land, the Palouse. Pristine, stark. It is a sheet of paper inviting my pen to dance into the very word, the verb.

Adjectives and adverbs stand at the ready. Their countenances seem to peer to the next page, seeking a means to link unto a wayword verb or reposing noun. A pinche predicate nominative sneers as it gravitates toward its proper placement, next to a Prufrockish indirect object-you know the kind!-the ones which would rather be edited out than act like a dangling participle. All those weirdy/beasty thingles are a bit much, but the poet within demands that I, at the very least, accord those lingualizing elements the benefit of the grammar. What else can a poet do?

It's part of the journey, that's all the damn thing can be-a moment regardless of its span. Even when some element dares to straddle my frontal lobes and demand that the poet come out to play, and the poet is too darn busy being a maudit kind of fellow at that precise moment that some pinche interrogative expletive desires utilization. Its jaws salivate as it imagines launching a grand metaphor, perhaps even a righteous mothuh-for someone. The thing feels frisky and wants to romp around, do something . . . any kind of thing that a thing can do.

It will even want to write a poem to some flower or potted notion, even to a jaded image. Commitments wilted away, promises jelled into bromides, causes jumping off bridges into the brine where time melts-any of those roosts can be an excuse for an element to participate.

The poet within, though, is too damn lazy or just plain astute to have to respond by rote to constricting parts of oration. Not everything needs lingualization, only that which one finds either illuminating or laughable.

I journey through an América Cósmica which reaches out culturally to the world. Its salsa and conjunto burn images of dance and celebration onto the filaments of my life.

It is the Arizona of night smells, desert hectivity as a bus traverses dunes of despair while we search for meaning on the way to commemorialize the 20th

Anniversary of August 29, 1970, and the blood of Rubén Salazar on the hands of the LA. Police, on the hands of those who fear involvement in cause which sings to all humanity, not just to Chicanos, the caring messages of struggle which César Chávez uttered. The celebration of the artist becomes a poet's song to an El Paso bato, Gene K.Wilson, whose demeanor had a realness not usually found in academe, certainly not in cultural postcards created outside the barrio which a hollow mierdalist put-onto walls well removed from truth/there is no Segundo or El Diablo nor other Chuco enclaves in temple basements or catholic high schools in bordertowns . . . only chochitos walk those corridors, not batos locos or pachucos. No need to pretend to be a bato, ese, even burros like your typical C.I.A. (Chicano-In-Activo), fanciful artististas that they be, should have some truth in some of what they do.There is verity to be found in academic halls, if not in Emily Zapato's roost south of the Golden Gate where truth is white-washed off poorly constructed casi-murals.

The poet within wants to sing corridos to 25 years of familial realization, silvery exclamations of existence . . . sharing the pain while a future beckons and we dance away into more of our familia regaling the moment with possibility.

Grandfather poetry sings within as I rediscover Don Cristobal and his penchant for re-naming the universe; he must surely have been the gran abuelo of all bureaucratic kkkoooolillaides batos, the mero pinche dude who decided that all Raza sans its g should be considered HisPanics, even graza in its boogie-woogie, good gosh, gertrudis, what a ghastly thing. I feel the constant drumming, the wailing saxophone, the bajo sexto, the guitarrón, la acordeón, harpa, marimba, clarinet and piano, while liras strum.

I merge into more of you merging into me, it is all us, even though we are so many different beings, each sentient and willing to poke into life and discover more ways of looking at our particularized realities.

"Why do you want to disturb my moseying about?" the snarling verb shouted at me. "Can't you pinche poets just let a verby be?"

Though its fangs appear poisonous, what with its slimey bromides slithering down its reddish flesh, the snout baring ivory prongs and fangs, its tongue wags out cantos and snarls fury as poems leap out. Bristles sprout from the dark meats of anger, while the slimey froth rushes onward as if to inundate language with wrath born from the pain of humanity unable to live up to the word that gave us birth.

My mind opens a trapdoor, stairs descend, and the Yerby enters cautiously, perhaps fearful of encountering Culonado de Corona or Moctecul-zoombah. Too much blood has already been spilled, and the word and I need to traverse an American Universal Mulfiverse, to create within these moments of the Poet as a jive Bro, a sense of language forcing the poet to become more of a noun, even a simple modifier, an inconsequential adverbial phrase, mayhaps a de-quantamized parenthetical underconstructed polymer hyperchromatized simile or at least a most restrained, requited linguistically constipated rhetorical statement.

Whatever it is that results in poems, it simply is a natural response to awareness, to experience. There is no need to seek constructions in order to fill them with content. It i`s all content, there, simply becoming visible, growing arms, tentacles, extremities, organs, arriving at its/their needed, rightful formation, as everything continues deforming, reforming, and again forming, so that we create grander senses of our mutual humanity. The word, elastic and plastic, cries out for utilization as a tool and mirror, that we might become venturously human as we will ourselves to confront our limitations. We colonize ourselves as surely as Colón strove to colonize his limited universe, yet the mestizo within sings poems which take the wine and bread, sotól y tortilla, and merge them into comestable outcries which cherish the possibilities of our existing within and without each other, each space in its own time/tense, no sequence other than events unfolding, agglutinating the now with yesterday and tomorrow, ever now in every nuance.

Disbordered, yet confined to an América where poesía dances snakelike, slithers and wends its way into the fleshy red meal aroused by musky nocha while arousing feral human wellspring into creating more musk and melon flesh, caressive flesh where the poem grouses, wanting to explode/implode : : the word slavers as it serpentinely makes its liquid way out the plumedmind-vessicle. The word turns, looks me in the spiriteye and then leaps onto the cibula rasa, tweaking my ChicAnglo side where another Amerika chats with good ole boy Chrisbuffalo Culónbia.

"Tickets, please," the Digestive Reader states at the door of the BookBus. "You can't get on and travel toward your poemseeing-the-light-of-print unless you get a ticket."

I search my sentience for the barter-goods and ask "How much is the fare to poetical expressivity?"

"Your pinche soul, ese," Reader responds, "the hair of the perra vida which bit you, the spittle of your anger and the mekatl grito streaming out your chorizo mestizo.

"Simply your truth, the life you are, and not a pretend to-be-a-bato or struggle-to-invent-a-self-which-doesn't-fit-you, only that which you are. Be a whore and not a prostitute, do what you must, your sense whether it pleases or displeases, live until you die so that it was your truth. Your respeto al derecho to be oneself, regardless of institutional, constitutional or constipational demands from family, community, pueblo or any other power. Be self, great unto one's image, but only if it is there, "Digestive finally stopped spewing verbiage. "Do you still want to become a poet?"

I simply got on the bus and went to the middle of the thing, sat down and inhaled reality, slowing letting it out to mingle with camels, winstons and luckies. My pall mall felt vaporingly soothing as I saw the lights of Phoenix. Stroking my sensual understanding of metaphors which bespeak panache, I was overtaken by verbs, nouns and other lingualizations.

"Are you going to accept our existence, poeta maldito?" the elements demanded, each bearing a look of assertion and affirmation on its linguistic brow. "Take us, bato, and create another sense of the moment that we might live in new sentient beings."

I stooped and picked up the grammatical shards, bits of near-ceramicized verbalizations and nuances, and then began stuffing them into my typewriter cartridge, cocking the damn thing as I slipped the paper deep into its inviting orificial spaces.

Fingering the buttons, I began opening up the layers of possibility, caressing rounded sounds and manipulating mounds of meaning into images and outcries. Oh, Poetry, my mind's hands seemed to murmur as my fingers massaged tones and denotations from the careening gerunds and pernicious predicates.

Write, the very word imprinted itself, and I found squiggly things taking shape, becoming words reforming into ideational constructions and notions began to deform only to become even more notationally deformed. There was no specific reason for the birthing of poems, yet each only had one reason out of many to be at that particular border . . . the poet bellows, I write, and in so doing become more as I deform my very self by giving another sketch, another skin, another skein, another polymorphic outcry, as I wend my way with a tray full of odes and other snacks and repasts to share with anyone who cares to stop for a moment and partake of life . . . I write to arrive at another sensual, intellectual and aesthetic borderline, to experience more of you, me, and the mehkqoverse . . . .

Ricardo Sánchez
Pullmania, Washington