Adobo Criollo Sergio Antonio Ortiz Rivera

Padded Apocalyptic In Emerald City

To the insolence of a scream The new big bang, is it the cry of an Emperor’s tired mule, or the screaming scent of night blooming jasmine?  Perhaps it is the riddles of the blue men of the Minch enchanted by the chocolate fragrance of the night, or the turquoise  music of the deckhands.  The new big bang, we got so dressed up  for that event we looked like mannequins who vomited because  worrying builds up fat.   

The Phone Call I turn my face and I am ten sitting by the phone waiting for your call.  All my dead are in a field of butchered children striving to appease this racing blood. I’ll renounce every grudge with a million oaths, press out every umbrage that fills my chest with pus if that phone rings and you ask for me, your only son... mother.

In This Well Come, there are no bodyguards in this well, only a shrine covered with crosses and a high mast fanned by invisible winds.  These mud walls regularly flinch like a drunken homosexual who just found out he’s HIV positive. “I want flowers, arum lilies, gardenias, and tulips; it’s the end of the year, time to celebrate.  Oh, and don’t forget to rent Gone with the Wind .  Please, no ashes, I want to be a diamond on a flashing white finger."

Tinta Entintar tu cuerpo con la nada  Sobre mi piel anudada  Es borrar la esquina de nuestro arrabal  Devolver los ojos tajeados al paredón de mi niñez.  Cible D'encrage de votre corps avec rien sur ma peau nouée Est effacé nôtre ghetto Rendre les yeux coupassent au mur de fusill é s de mon enfance. Ink Inking your body into nothing On my very knotted skin Erases the corner of our ghetto Returns these slashed out eyes to the executioner's Wall of a sad and lonely youth. الحبر بلدان منكم الهيئة لا تملك شيئا مني جدا باﻵخرين الجلد أو زاوية نظرنا الغيتو عودة هؤلاء الى تخفيضها في عينيه ألا في جدار الحزن على أعمال الشباب.

Time Waits Once I was a mute rock, a muffled accordion, smothered cello hiding in my secret pain, wearing a trench coat of unidentified emotions.   There was always the fear I would break and everything I’d worked so hard to cover up with fancy rhinestone mustangs would gallop forth in all its rawness to be ripped apart. Time waits for the first of us to speak, then opens up a city hydrant.   That’s when our language disappears, and all we hear is the resonance of laughter.

I wrote the poem below this tango. Harassed, because I woke up humming this song for two days in a row.  I guess that when a poem wants to be written it will do just about anything to show its strength. Sergio

Harassed what I want to be is thread mark live coal a distinct aptitude the hawfinch song with a hawk-owl tail in short it is a different offering hounding my heart he is a well built panic room the minimal significance  of a phonetic expression on the tongue

Last Stop that my worst enemy not be the barbarian’s footservant’s verse or his easy-going memory that I may choose a tougher skin for my errant legs, not one that collapses in a galloping fire that my words come from a recognizable palace furnished with truth, joy, and pain that the most embellished portrait keep me alive at the last stop of the Orient Express

Take the Blank Page to the cacophony of other poets the ones that mock my images that other me making fun of me whispering: take-the-blank-page and make it your home wheel it through life after all, we are that ram that keeps the balance on the low end of the blank page the gun, the seed of the old gender that forbids all unauthorized transportation of cum fallen in the activity of love, the inferno that genetically manipulates the bent germ from the juice of war.

Penance A lizard bit a spider  in  your lumberjack’s tool shed.  I cried  watching it rot like a dead, dry trunk. Today it rained,  you clamped  the memories  of everything  we’d built together trying  hard to make me smile. The fragrance of the moon is profoundly asleep, but the sun is awake.