San Po Po Season

If you google "San PoPo Season", nothing relevant comes up. But everyone in Guatemala City knows about San Po Pos.
Perhaps I am spelling it incorrectly, although it is difficult to imagine a more feasible permutation.

They look like a bizarre hybrid of ants and flies. It's as though the two species had too much to drink one night, and woke up the next morning thinking how the hell did this happen?! 

Which is exactly what I said in response to the sudden arrival of San Po Pos.  While I was away doing an exercise video to stave off laziness and boredom, they snuck into my room, blanketing my quilt with four-legged nuisances. When the rainy season hits--and it has--the neighborhood ladies say that they fall from the sky with the rain.   

Adults and children alike collect the San Po Pos in jars and eat them for lunch. There are contests for who can eat the most. They dare us to comelo, just one.  It's una tradicion.

There are many traditions, like San Po Po season, that seem unsavory to an outsider's eye.  For example, for birthday parties, firecrackers are set off at the crack of dawn. The sound wakes the entire street corner, its pesky bang-BANG-bangbang-BANG louder than any iPhone alarm clock. This might just be an annoyance, if I didn't live in Esperanza, famous for the more-than-occasional sunset shootings.

As it is, one quickly learns the difference between tiny popping firecrackers and gunshots from an automatic rifle. But, that first time, when you don't know the difference--your blood goes thick like lead as you sit in bed and wonder, why are there so many automatic rifles going off at breakfast? The truth, is--very few people with a Brahva hangover are likely to crawl out of bed before noon to pump someone's belly full of lead.

The bugs smell like citronella when you crush them, and since the soap is always half-diluted, I spent most of San Po Po season smelling like a bargain-shop tiki torch. I suppose this odor is better than the ever present smell of burning trash, which I grew accustomed to after the first day.  Although, I cannot help but wonder if this perpetual sore throat and runny nose is not a result of the rainy season, but rather a response to the acrid perfumes of battery smoke and old toilet seats.

One of the women who works here is eight months pregnant, and lives on the precipice overlooking the dump.  Every morning, she climbs a small mountain to get into the neighborhood.  I don't know her well, but I often wonder if it would be strange to offer to rub her feet.  There are so many things I can't do--but I can give a pretty good foot rub.

~~~~~~~~~~

Our librarian's neighbor was shot. She was dating some of the gang members.  When it happened, a man was wailing about his brother, and so we thought it was a man who was killed.  Oddly, he was screaming about a brother. mi hermano, ay mi hermano, no, mi hermano. 

It's very possible that, as is often the case, I misheard him. That o could easily have been an a.  If his keening hadn't doubled and tripled the length of his vowels--I'd be more willing to admit that, like the time I asked for a "half book of rice"--my intermediate Spanish steered me wrong.

I wonder what his brother had to do with the shooting. Was it his girlfriend? Was he the one who shot the gun? Why wasn't anyone screaming over the dead girlfriend?

In Guatemala, a person is buried many times over.  The first time, they are buried in their coffin; a rather large plot. This lasts for fifteen years, until the body has decomposed enough to be moved to a smaller resting place.  Then, it is exhumed and moved to a smaller plot, to make room for new cemetery visitors.

The family pays for the cemetery plot every year, and then pays an additional premium to have the body exhumed and moved to its second home.  If they cannot pay, remains are thrown into the city dump.  The cemeteries are crowded, so people are buried into the walls of the cemetery in order to make room for new occupants.

This is how Guatemalans visit their ancestors: Ccimb a ladder, pay your respects, climb back down to earth.  The plots are crowded on Mother's day, Father's day,Semana Santa, and particularly popular birthdays.

~~~ ~~~  ~~~

The view at night is incredible, and in the morning, too. Two volcanoes, ready to help the sun rise in as glorious a manner as possible. Always crowned in mysterious cloud cover.  Ready to have poems written in its honor,  to defy your sense of longevity and endurance.  And just to the left of these prehistoric monuments--the city dump.  Always on fire, even during the rainy season.

I wonder if the city dump-creators had a sense of humor, or just lacked appreciation for a good landscape.

Reflections on the first week in Esperanza

The sky is purple in the evening; low-hanging clouds of humid pollution make the town below a watercolor painting.  Blurred lines, houses stacked on top of  one another. Ridged sheet metal with crosses and messages and street numbers painted onto the sides slapped up against one another--saving space, sharing materials--whatever the reason might be for having such closely kept neighbors.

No one has enough, but there is ample time to keep score.  The have-less, the have-none, have-some, the gets-by.

In Esperanza, women build the schools, sell the vegetables & paper & food, raise & rear the children. Meanwhile, men go about drinking beer, breaking shit and making nighttime into closed doors and hushed voices, jumping at crack of gun or car.
 
 The woman who makes tortillas across the street is superstitious and spits into the dough. Four for a Quetzal, they'll burn hands from their thin plastic bag so juggle them with a couple liters of beer. Hop skip jump up the stairs lickety-split to avoid the smattering of evening rain.  Beer is shared piecemeal between mugs but all four liters are finished by ten; the tortillas are clammy when fried with the morning eggs.

 Up the hill, city center is a globular cluster of iridescent green and yellow. The sonorous tin roof rain is made less romantic by a flooding kitchen. Over half of the shared living space is outdoor; so when it rains, stack into the kitchen and mimic the neighborhood architecture. What little space there is to be had is shared between flies and a foundling cat.

In the hours between beer and drowsiness, play at getting along with the techo-mates. With three-to-a-room, countless prayers request a moment to dress in ripped underwear without concern of unwanted voyeurs. Other times, it is nice to hunker down shoulder to shoulder in shared joy and misery to see what unfolds among souring beer and waterlogged streets.

I carried you all over town.

I carried you all over town.

I carried you through the east village, 

and whispered,

these are the places I would go,
the park where you could score
big drugs in the eighties, now
filled with bilingual children
a community garden &
mutts kicking up dust in
languid clouds that
settled into their pelts
dappled with dirt
freckles like the ones
you had in late August,
& we connected the dots
finding symbols between
those imagined lines.

I walked to the top of the island and
stopped on the peaked rocks to see
the rich folks from afar, whispered
the graffitied messages spouting
an eternal end, the low hanging threats
painted as a last resort
protesting the end of protest
hoarse voiced and weak after
years of being told they won.

And nodded off to dream sounds in a basement
once full of our nation's greatest dissenters
now sated by a class
believing in thirteen minute drum solos and
the value of a college education
Never having eaten baked beans from the
can for the love of an idea,
they have to hold onto something.


I carried you all over town
and then I let you go.

among the first wildflowers I found
speckled sunlight like you wouldn't believe
old high rises at either side
the river to your back
& quiet guitar floating over the hill
singing,
she is standing right in front of me.
speaking words of wisdom
let it be


I watched the sunlight catch the
most minute parts
before the wind current
bore them across town.

your shadow on my hand
our last day spent
as compensation for stolen time.

Wheel of Time

Back to Songwriting

This is a link to a rough draft of a song I wrote. I've written, re-written and scrapped this one so many times, and then suddenly, after months of being unable to produce anything at all, this little ditty just finished itself.

the bravest thing I've ever done

I was probably eight, and playing
in the yard because it was springtime
and my mom told me that I had to stop reading
the Bible because it was just a bunch of begats and begots and
it made the church ladies very nervous.

You sent me outside to get some fresh air, which
was not so mean, because I was losing track of the order
of the biblical stories; some were clear-cut and concise,
 others were pieced together, like
the yo-yo quilt we had hanging as a shower curtain in
the only bathroom of the house.

So I was pretending that my cat was a
pilgrim on his way to the holy land, and
I followed him over limestone outcroppings,
avoided the places where Ellie said there was poison oak
down to the path behind my house owned by a man
who mumbled to himself and rarely washed
his hands.

and he still owns fields where
he keeps dozens of horses; the setting for
a fantasy of a girl of eight who thinks
that reading the Bible is a satisfactory
activity on a June day.

We pass old Fords and boxcars and budding wineberry bushes
and black-eyed susans and I lose track of my
white cat, Snowball, named in an age before irony was
 the common tongue spoken in our home.

 I do not know the way and I keep walking, never thinking about
who might have written the graffiti on the trees, and why someone
would dump a rusting 50's style car into the woods, or how long ago
the pile of ashes in front of the boxcar had been a fire.

At the end of this seemingly endless path, there is a gate--
and in the gate there is a field and in the field there are
probably five unbridled horses running and walking, but
mostly just standing around.

So, of course, I climb under the fence and enter.

I walk to the top of the hill and just sit in the field, and watch
the horses do their horsey things, I think about how
this is freedom because I didn't have to spy through
the slatted gate or step up on my tiptoes to
pet their velvety noses, I just had to sit quietly
and wait for them to come up to me, and some
of them really did.

And that is the bravest thing I've ever done.

Excerpt from a dream journal kept in Irving, Texas.

in trying to sort out what I am and what i want, I have been following my father's advice, and looking through my dream journal for answers.


August 20, 2013

In the dream, I am on an old-style airplane. Like the ones Wright Brothers flew.  Two of my old lovers are sitting in the back; they are merged into one person with a flickering face, changing constantly between the two that I have known.

We are flying over sights just like the ones in the American Airlines inspirational video.  Above is blue.  Below is Canyon DeChelly--even more beautiful than I remember. 

I blink, and the controls change. Now they are modern and complicated, full of command buttons and a joystick instead of the yoke I'd seen before.  

The plane is falling. Gradually at first, then into an impossible tailspin.  Trying to help, Brendan(s) tries to crawl up to me, just as the airplane pitches forward to an impossible attitude.  He is thrown from his seat and into the air, holding on to me by linked pinkies.  I try to fix the positioning of the airplane, but the engines are out. heis screaming for help, asking and begging me to fix it, but I can't. 

He tumbles out completely, face still flickering...

I slide out of my seat, simple and light, and follow his descent without protesting. Because, what else could I do.  

In the air, We detach from one another, and I watch him become a speck and then disappear below me. I am suspended in the air,  floating like paper in the sky. Before I hit the ground, I evaporate into that robin's egg blue and the  green-speckled clay of Canyon deChelly. I become nothing. 

Tonight, I want to dream something new.  

It's not about the destination, it's about the lunatics on the bus.

Passive Aggressive Letters to the Passengers on the New York-bound megabus, departing Washington DC Wednesday, January 22^nd, 11:59 pm:

Dear man just behind me and to the left,

No one understands love gone wrong like I do. I’m really sorry about Shanna.  She sounds like a dick. You said it yourself; she disrespected your grandmother. You know what I think you should do? Forget that ageist assclown, and get off of the fucking phone.

No one on this bus is going to appreciate your self-righteous indignation, so why waste your poetic sermon on deaf, silently enraged ears?  No, good sir. You keep quiet until the morning. Then, at the crack of dawn, go to the top of the Rockefeller Building and dispense this diatribe on the unsuspecting tourists who pay fourteen dollars to climb to the top of a building in the middle of winter.   

Like the rooster of our generation, you’ll wake them all to the sunrise of this new day, this brave new world where love has lost for once and for always.  You’ll crow a song of anger, a song of love, a song of Shanna; that cold, shrill voice on the phone who keeps hanging up on you.  That’ll teach her. That’ll teach them all.

Dear man just next to him,

Weezy does rule. And I am very curious to know whether rapping his songs aloud is some kind of elaborate protest against the man just behind me and to the left, an open audition for any booking agents or club owners who might be taking this bus, or just an ardent display of fandom. However, after seeing Weezy live in 2009, I came to the realization that his stuff is way better when heard through a sweet set of speakers. It just doesn’t translate as well to live performance, y’know? 

Keeping that in mind, please, shut the fuck up before I strangle you with your Skullcandy earbuds. 

Dear man just in front of me,

At first, I thought you were watching American Horror Story: Coven, but then Woody Harrelson showed up, and I don’t think he’s on that show.  In fact, I think this is a movie.  And now the plot thickens--Christopher Walken and Colin Farrell are onscreen.  Kind sir, what the fuck is this cinematic revelation? Why is everyone in it? Is that Kevin Bacon?  And did you seriously bring popcorn and beer on the megabus?

Man in front of me, I think I love you.

Dear very well groomed man just to my right,

Your Louis Vuitton bag is a decade out of season, but in a really great way.  I especially love how it appears to be actual Louis Vuitton.  Like, Louis himself made that initials-speckled purse on your lap, and you are wearing the hell out of it.   Since you’re on a megabus, you appear to be a bargain-minded, gentleman, so I feel compelled to divulge a little secret…

Did you know that Sonoma for Target does a really great Vuitton  knock-off these days?

Never mind, you're way too classy for that shit.

To the group of five nineteen year old boys who just boarded in Baltimore, smelling strongly of weed,

 Good on you.  But, no—you cannot sit next to me.

Might I suggest that you go sit with the guy just behind me and to the left, now loudly weeping over Shanna energetically enough that I am convinced he is the Edgar Allan Poe of our generation, and Shanna is his Lenore.  Sounds like he could use a bowl or two.

Dear Shanna (who is still on the phone with the man just behind me and to my left),

I cannot believe he is forgiving you for this shit. It’s unacceptable, and you know it. You can’t treat a person that way. Especially when he needs to express his forgiveness at such a decibel.

This whole bus hates you so fucking much. Change your name. Change your address. Cover up that tattoo of a peace sign on your upper hip. I’m fucking coming for you.