There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
She bought a guitar.
And lived in it,
Too.
Originally intended as a tool shed, this 2-story guitar (the power lines in the lower left corner are life size) may very well end up becoming my home. In my dreams for the night, if not for real. I could teach the rain to play chords, construct a system of sails, and the wind would strum the windows until a symphony of old-school padrino music was produced. People would come from miles around, to hear the gringo in the guitar house, singing his weird and mournful gangster love march.
La musica de los padrinos escuelas viejas.
The music of the old-school gangsters of the heart.
Who are the true, old-school gangsters of the heart? The aged and leathered gringos, drinking native sodas on the corner? The women hanging clothes to dry in a cloud of lemon-flavored dust? Drivers of the citrus buses groaning? Who is riding in the flowered sugar coffin floating down the Río Papaloapan? Mi gran amigo, long perdido?
Mi corazón?
Mi madre?
Is the word really a weapon? Am I a coyote, or a chicken? Does the word smuggle emotions like dangerous, forbidden narcotics under the barbed-wire border of your heart?
Will the walls ever come down?
The horn section will shout.
Is love just code for doubt?
Ecstasy is out.
Today we traffic love. We hide our tunnels in old, abandoned graveyards.
We are in pursuit of the elusive
Fentanyl of Gold.
But the question persists, in spite of the rain strumming the power lines strung across my open window. The symphony is grand, but a question blares at me in 4-part, car-horn harmony, like a dissonant, persistent need, buried with a sack of unmarked Fentanyl in the abandoned graveyard of desire.
It's not a question of love. Gangsters of the heart have chiseled all the names they're ever going to chisel on the tilted, weathered tombstones beating in their chests. Love is not the question. The question is,
Do I have what it takes
To become a gangster chicken?
The diamond consequenciales are forever.
It's ahora, man, or never.
Who will roast the gangster chickens
In a burning, brimstone marinade?
I ordered a molten flower
at the BBQ of power.
Pollo thugs unite.
