Mexican journal

 If I hadn’t read Emerson in college
 I would have become a poet of mercurial evanescence:
 blowing snow and sobs in the night,
    tires rolled in ditches
       and broken plumbing–
 but having read him
 likewise do I know
 we were gods for a day


After the morning rains have ended and the clouds dispersed
the sun comes out
in the little terra-cotta patio
of the La Paz Hotel
shining in the bougainvillea
where the finches come to sing for 100 years



 How impoverished
 becomes the old iglesia
 when it has enough money
 to replace its bronze iron bell
 with digital carillons                    -Cozumel


 can’t be reduced
 rain on a green poncho
 shoveling sandbags




 Every new technology
 bursts upon the scene

 With this familiar routine:
 better! faster! more!

 Until it morphs
   into just another thing
     to pay for




Give thanks
social programming
has not yet mastered
its science

Though countless give themselves to Oz and his decimals
give thanks
moon    wind    sand
fall untrammeled & free
also me!




 in the cheap hotel downtown
    a hairpin
       left on the sink--


hammer-swing 
to fingers
holding eight-penny nails-
constructor of cusswords





 warm nights in Quintana Roo
 out to fetch some local brew
 strange to see Orion too
 in an unbuttoned shirt and beach shoe


 stick-legged flamingos
 wade steel-silver rain-ponds
 on the hotel’s roof
                        -Zuanajoly, Cancun


how came I to love
the way she chinned her pillow
slipping on the case


like my neighbors
I’ve left my key in the lock
how many times?



 the music of block and tackle hoisting buckets of wet concrete by Mexican laborers building the new hotel at Portofino reminded me of Cendrars
 the way odd sound Scott his ear
 but then everything in sunny Mexico reminds me of Blaise


 to shave
 or not to shave:
 who gives a damn?           


 here in the warm Caribe
 all the detritus of material life
 is stripped down to the low bank of cumulus
 highlighted with late sun
 over the outer reefs



 it’s probably just as well the natives
 don’t care about basura
 because if they cared
 then they’d care about other things
 like banning your swim
 across the harbor at dusk
 or padlocking access to roofs
 for moon watching
 or making you wear sandals
 at la cantina

                  -Cancun





 40 years of buzz
 turned his liver
 into was             

-angelo