The Face Without Makeup (audio only)
Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem.
His country was language,
His culture escritura,
In the frontiers
Of concrete imagination mask
He pursued his ‘identity.’
Bourgeoisie family had Cuban African slaves,
He went to the Cuban barrio
Of his invisible relatives,
Communion with them,
A history hidden of unlikely semblance,
Prose them into first novel.
What Virginia Loba said
You need a room and some money
To write
Idle, make mistakes, write re-write
Juan son of the bourgeois,
Rejected his nation
But not the money,
The Greek Theater
In Berkeley
Gets full like a bowl
Mexican-Central American
Caribbean Latinos
Bubbling like fruits
Within the rainbow blanket
Of colors
Corn maidens
Barley princesses
Chocolate sense and desire,
Rye toast
Sugar cane and plantain
Mountain sculpture
Wave spring bushes
In front of Zeus-Apollo,
As the singers invoke
The indigenous Gods
Singer sonero.
Caribbean substrata Yoruba
Yemayá-Shango fire and water music,
Them are the lyrics present,
So I open a book
A row of camels marches out,
The Sahara such infinite sand
Like the sky on land,
Where waves of dunes design motion,
Camel wants me jump upon its back,
Go riding gallop the letters of its words,
Who together compose music
Based upon an air that frames arithmetic,
Images from where they were
Prior to focus, just move through special
Terrain of pebbles in perpetuity, a date palm
Leans in the nowhere path of a lizard
Snake skin sunshine, eats a scorpion,
Of everyday fathom air