To Keep it a Cento

We are standing on the wrong side,
people whose last names end in z.

I know their dark eyes, they know mine.
How it is to monument their eyes.

I am not the hero of this piece,
but now my face is stuck to lampposts.

On my knees in the night,
saying prayers in the streetlight.

Fished from the folds of my brain,
the brown body laid quietly

calling me a puto for crying.
Save those tears, you’ll need them later.

Days dead the day before.
Pistol on them fools,

you know the rules.
The birds are here to root

because multiplication
is our favorite sport.

Put my anywhere on God’s
green earth, I triple my worth.

What’s more important: the flower,
or the soil that grow it?

These are the games we play,
we are the names they say.

The game was inevitable.
It was Manifest Destiny.

It’s in my blood to live
this large, Escobar cigars

avoiding the prison bars.
That’s why they follow me, huh,

they think I know the way.
This barefoot that bare soul

I bare the load, oh
pinche herida abierta indeed.

The quiet of a funeral
is the Americas. In each,

I am a failed anthem.
The fault line between me

runs north from south,
pulling me down into the oldest countries

of my body. Ours is a long love
song, a push out into open air.

I go on & on, can’t understand
how I last so long. I must have

spent my life arguing the bullshit.
I want to argue for the stars, but

I find them missing through this
window splattered with mud.

I want the hood to want me
back—in a place I could not

bring myself to name.
Y’all gon’ make me lose

my mind, reportin’ live
from the other side.

I’m from where too many lives
twenty-five years or fewer.

No sleep or dreams.
Streets too loud to ever

hear freedom ring.
Nothing ever happens,

till it happens. Here,
a spirit must yell

to be heard, yet a bullet
need only whisper.

Believe you me, homie,
there’s only the boom

-box that has lived longer
than your neighbor’s child.

They knew they were born
to wear the dead boy on T-shirts.

That’s the way every day goes
every time we’ve no control.

I’m starting to believe ain’t no
such things as Heaven’s

trumpets. I sit alone
in a four-cornered room.

A shadow hangs
where my country

should grow. Blood
soaks my sneakers.

A pool of grief puddled
around our single body.

Listen, my dogs,
the beginning of this

bloodline of mine,
you have never

imagined paradise,
nor made a country

of your ghetto.
Throw your hands

up in the sky,
and say baby,

we are hundreds.