Adobo Criollo Sergio Antonio Ortiz Rivera

Herbarium Hitchhiking in the dark could not have been as shocking as they say.  Traveling from garden to garden.  The passenger takes out his book of fragrances and twirls on this road show.  Old nightingales perch on his arms as he compresses the tears shed for those souls whose faces begin to disappear against the colorless glass of so many years. The traveler opens the book crying, and the footloose fragrances initiate their dance as he stares out the window at the city lights.

Parnassus  ii                   collaboration between Henry L. Shifrin and Sergio A. Ortiz A bit down mountain, shadowed by an overhanging cliff, I watch a cataract run like whiskey down a dry throat of rusted rock and remember every time I reveled in diving down as far down as the dive would take me, the spume that wakes a fall’s path, rising above me, the exhaust of my leaving, now the skin of my childhood as I stand mid-mountain. The day you left Parnassus, I went into the mud and broke out howling. The tempting tender racemes of my skin crumbled like an invitation to dust and its tomb, full of funeral bouquets, tore and shagged nature’s perverse angels. At the abyss of their mangrove I ate their carnivorous flowers mistaking them for the hush of placenta, then threw myself off Pegasus to step down from that muscled back, to eye the sweeping shadow of wings that once raised...

You Love,  move aside,  don’t try to walk  over this grief  barefooted. I’ve laughed and cried  too many times  at the clock,  a promiscuous condition of Lazarus.  Oh sweet genital grief— You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe — there is a dead man  on my bed and  it looks like …

Weeping at the crossroads I confuse dawn with dusk  and jump into a chimera saying:  Wear out serenity, drink it dry. We’re not only made of time.  We run with regret behind us and terror before us, secretly  wishing we were no longer together  by Bastille Day, while sipping  English tea and watching Columbus, the damn gigolo, lick smelly royal  unicorn vagina, Isabel’s, the official  regal sampler of foreskin. She dedicated herself like a junky  to knitting Boabdil’s war at home,  and genocide abroad. The first  modern woman was Charlotte Corday it’s a shame she's not a contemporary mummy  at Musée Du Louvre. A woman  behind no famous man, a saint  chiseled in guaiacum, one of the three  faces of Eve that hunted down  the novicery of Adam.

These are the dog days, the serpent  coiled around  the branch days, the dumb-mute  streets of sweaty,  malodorous  cabaret lovers  copulating  on the internet days, the oranges shining brightly  in the pool days, the moon  losing its bell days. These modern  days by which poets  curse and embrace  dignity, without  the exception  of the wind, are bastards.

Twenty Years of “Nobility of Blood” s obre todo perdona a la mayoría moral, intachable y serena que a ú n ignora la dulce cortadura de tu espada de carne….                                                                         Jose Manuel Otero 1948-1990 Dear Lord, this Thanksgiving all the drug-lords promise to thank you for AIDS, although it has not made them transcend into the 21st century. They are still caught up in superficial things like politics, and busting, or killing corrupt cops. We thank you for tent evangelists, brothers and sisters alike, breeders of hate crimes that reject the perfect beauty of botany almanacs, hom...

Las Acacias Todo hombre ilustre se nutre de un amigo imaginario para perder el roció y segar el tallo de las acacias. Yo me levanto   y observo mi cuerpo desnudo frente al espejo de pared.   Corro al baño a vomitar cansado de vivir. Las putas de los templos han vuelto a quedarse dormidas frente mi puerta.

Lost Cowbells Penelope took my bones, washed them in the clear stream of patina lyrics.  This world is no longer the same loving heap of dusk.  It is full of man-made fireflies and lost cowbells.  I see myself ever so far from the children—with no one clawing at my clawing thighs, aged by the legends of the sun:  Love is a nine-life gigolo who walks aloof and priggish.

Unusual lover                             for Jose Ramos Otero what is it about night that you carry it in your mouth beyond the moon’s orbit and time through strange paths frequented by Thanatos and his twin brother?  Is whatever just happened already a memory, or are our tongues blushing from the exchanged saliva? Be rid of that black cloak in your eyes. We were the strays that taught gods how to die in this queer universe.

Paper man  your heart has long been  breaking others. Soon you’ll turn  into a verb or dust, or distant symphony —much more remote than the poem  in which you are now trapped; It may very well be the way  we’ll ever reach dust on dust, shag on shag.

The Shadow of my Desire Bladed fan, painful stuffing, where are the night ladders recalling jungle bypaths on which we walked with sand-clocks remembering noonday lips and stares, labyrinths of smoked stars?   I feel them rising again like Lazarus, hallucinations milking my desire.  Bladed fan, painful stuffing, today is the funeral of the cruelest metaphor.

Cesa Éramos boleristas con las cabezas en las nubes, mecánicos, comerciantes, maratonistas, estudiantes.  Escribíamos sobresaltados contemplando la capital desde el Yunque. Rio Piedras, mi hogar, el lugar del festejo sobre camas ajenas y solitarias como los espejos desde donde solo se contempla al tiempo arrugado, inconsciente del salitre quincallero del Viejo San Juan.  Allí nadie predicaba sobre degenerados sexuales que no hacían otra cosa más que mamar en cuanto rincón oscuro de la Calle Sol encontraban. Allí llegábamos a la palabra cesa donde la nostalgia se convierte en alabastro, lagrima, y esperma.

nunca he sabido conjurar al silencio                                                      ni a las sombras de mi alma que huyen junto al ocaso ni a palabras que roban mi calma ni a arboles artificiales o sofás para robots ni al verbo anti-homoerótico de hombres necios, maricones sin patria ni al hedor inmencionable de é ste siglo de guerras por eso me siento con soga y nudo en mano

Epilogue a collaborative poem by Arunansu Banjeree and Sergio A. Ortiz    1. Trudging aimless amidst the mixed crowd of angry young men, octogenarians,   a few fair damsels, chirpings, smiles and an underlying tone of a strange   inferiority complex, I still think of you. Are you busy with your dreams now? You must be relaxing by your balcony enjoying the company of sparrows, and those imaginary butterflies   you used to tell me about. Yes, I still love your touch, your whispers in the morning breeze. I wish to cook for you your favorite gazpacho soup.   How life slips, slithers between our fingers! You are somewhere in Alpine snows, I'm   slogging over the age-old pavements of dusty Kolkata, with the maddening crowd ever to eager   to clinch the best bargain. How bargains slip through our hands! Here I am in an internet parlour mailing you, yet your face seems so blurred in the photograph,  ...