Where I am King and Do Not Recycle

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                           In Mexico, I’m not Mexican, I’m an overweight Yankee.

The apartment building

where the cats slept in carports

was pale-green,

enablers lived there, hobblers too,

men who swore by their living

and made love beneath a coat of arms.

I hear that today is the twenty-first anniversary

of your not speaking Spanish.

Si, es mi cumpleaños.

If we sought too much of them,

they were not there.

Wolf, walked the Pomona Fair

and hat, wanted and taken, was stabbed

in the graffiti of his heart.

I can’t be with him anymore.

I go to his grave but he’s not there.

Hawks watch over

and shrivel up at night.

We walk the beach,

collecting the stillborn juices

of dark-pink flowers:

sustenance, payment

for those who’d lost.

There’s no sunrise like the California sunrise,

it’s like watching your mother weep

by the side of a van.

A wish made long, tonsil-like.