When I was a young poet,
I found the best method of writing
was to get dressed up like a French chambermaid,
stockings, garters and all,
and then to slit my wrists.
I was immediately faced with a decision:
Write an apologetic note that attempted to explain this scene
to the sad soul who discovered it,
Or to write something that would obliterate their vision.
I often used my own blood to write.
There was plenty of it.

Now that I am old,
I find that every moment is an awkward tragedy
begging for explanation.
This tattered recliner, a table perpetually set for two,
a row of shot glasses, a box of empty envelopes.
It pleases me to be the caretaker of this spiritual
refuse trapped in sidewalk cracks,
pushing a broom through the many chambers
of this museum mortared with my spit and sinew.

At the ubiquitous yuppie way station
I take my medicine:
A dark mug of koffeine, with cigarette butts floating like marshmallows.
My eyebrows snarl at the fragile thing in my favorite seat,
Sending her scrabbling away for human company.
At last I am alone with the blank page, ever awful, empty and expectant,
a fanfold stack of polygraph paper, just waiting for me to spill the first lie.
I have made it my business to tell monstrous, loquacious, perfect lies.
In this way my sins pay for themselves.
I’m just trying to suffer quietly around sips of koffeine
and perhaps accidentally write the most despicable blue collar love poem
this side of Indiana,
when some young Turk cracks open a sonnet on the edge of the bar,
challenging me to a duel,
waving the jagged rhyme at my face.
So young, and already a poet! Goddamn this world.
I decide to go easy on him, a kindred spirit in this country of vampires.
I say to the young Turk,
“When the Child was 57,
he discovered an old shoebox on a high shelf in the garage.
Inside he found all the time he had wasted.
Being a neighbor to dotage,
he placed the box into the hands of his son
who devoured it greedily and set sail for Berkeley
with Imogene, the girl he did not love.”
The young Turk doubles over in grief, ink spraying from his lips.
I turn back to the page, now covered in crisp glyphs of blood.

Later, I encounter a girl scout outside the supermarket.
She brandishes a tin cup and asks me if I could spare some jism.
They’re cloning poets to raise money
for a trip to Cairo and didn’t I have a moment to blow a wad?
I tell her I came at the office and shove past.
When I see the young girls at the supermarket,
my joints creak like the strained masts of a withered salt-soaked clipper.
I am reminded of those days before sleep had been invented,
before intoxication had a patent.
My dreams drifted above the landscape as mighty leviathans,
their spines formed from entire mountain ranges.
But now, I am perplexed by the array of oatmeal
here in the cereal aisle of the supermarket.
Behold the artist in his twilight, squinting at cryptic nutritional information.
I find no poetry in these consumable halls
until I reach the checkout
and see the young man laying down
roses, condoms and a bottle of Jaegermeister.
I could die tonight certain that there was still romance in this world.

That night, while I am occupied with filling cracks in the wall
with haiku,
the phone rings and I hear the red apple voice of a lost son,
ancient wine still dripping from his lips.
“I am in love,” he says.
“Tell me what secret poetry will seal her heart forever.”
I instruct him to get a butter knife and cut out his intestines.
He would have no further use for them.
Next he should empty his bank account and buy her a dress sewn in Valhalla.
Then stretch his heartstrings across a cheap pawnshop violin.
Give these gifts to her.
It is best to get the formalities out of the way as soon as possible.
The man I believed to be my son gushes his thanks and says goodbye.
I study the cracks in the wall,
the table set for two,
the violin that had been returned to me so soon.
I sit down in the tattered recliner, notebook in hand.
Reaching beneath my sweater, I touch the pendulum that swings there,
slowly bringing it to rest.
It will be millennia before they discover me,
cradled inside this brownstone,
encased by the glacier of a new ice age I have felt encroaching
since the day my tears turned to ink.
My face will be lashed down in a rictus
overlooking a final ejaculation of verse.
They shall see where my soul burned into
the last period I would ever write,
exiting at the end of my epitaph:
I was a poet and I drank deeply.

Surveying 31 days of scars
An infirmary for words
Just shoot them as they sleep
I cannot bear their needy countenances
for another day
I gilded my tongue with water from the black flask
Now everything I say is the absolute truth
Even my dream self points a finger
Muttering sideways to its brothers
At how changed I am
The stain of words prints my bedsheets
with a map of meanings
I am too weary to decipher
I must break all my fingers
Before they scoop out my eyes
So tired of seeing everything
in the light of my own heart

bought new snow shovel

i look out window each day

not a flake in sight

“Monserrat, that’s French, right?”
My dad was born somewhere in Cuba to a huge, loving family.
No, scratch that.
His parents were both dead before he was five
And he was raised by a loving uncle.
No, scratch that.
My father’s parents were dead and he was a slave, forced to work in the fields
With the other unfortunate Cuban boys.
One day, he escaped to a nearby village to the north.
The mayor took pity on him and the community raised him like their own son.
Or so I am told.

“Monserrat – Isn’t that French?”
Thank God my dad wouldn’t let me learn Spanish
So I could understand the secrets passing between my parents
Right in front of me.
Thank God I can’t write a beautiful bilingual love poem
And exponentially increase my chances of getting laid
By some Latina hottie.
No, Spanish would not have been helpful at all.
When I go to Lottaburger, I might actually get the very same burger I ordered.
I might have slept through Spanish 101 instead of getting my ass kicked by French 101.
“Ohhhh, Andre Monserrat, eh?” said my merciless French professor.
“Don’t think you won’t have to work in my class, because monsieur, I’m going to make sure you work.”
So for a semester I Je vaied, I accent agued, I com ci com caed.
But, folks, my parents could have named me Fred Astaire
And I’d still be a skinny white boy who can’t dance.
In short, Je ne parle pas Francais! Comprende?
Naming an Hispanic kid “Andre Monserrat” is just plain cruel and unusual.
It’s like naming someone Hans Olafson and telling him he’s not Norwegian!

Like I said, my father was raised as a community service project in some nameless Cuban village.
The country lavished opportunities on him like the generous uncle he fabricated to hide the truth.
Many years later, he found himself as one of Castro’s bodyguards.
Standing behind the little dictator in his booth at the baseball game,
My father thought, “I worked so hard for this?
I trained for this?
I bear an automatic weapon to protect this man?
I smell treachery on him
I am so close and he trusts me implicitly.
I am so close and his eyes are fixed on the batter.
I could end him here.”
But then there would have been no Andre.
My dad did not assassinate Castro.
Instead we have a missile crisis and Elian.
Instead we have one more poem.

“Monserrat, like the island?”
That was cool for about three months because of that Beach Boys song:
“Martinique, that Montserrat mystique.”
Oh baby, yeah that’s my island all right.
Everyone there speaks French, the language of love.
On my island, we reach up and squeeze the sun to make Mai Tais
Which we drink all day long.
But last I checked there was a big volcano ejaculating all over the jungle
Straight up on the Pompeii tip
While a bunch of Rasta-looking guys ran screaming past the CNN camera crew.
Folks, that is not a piece of real estate I want to have anything to do with.

So my dad bided his time.
Let Castro give him an education.
Let Castro groom him to step into a place of power.
Let Castro send him to East Germany to study with all the other promising young Cuban men.
Now was his chance.
But there was a wall.
Castro was far away; he may as well have been on the moon,
But there was a wall.
He pressed against it to feel the warm promise glowing from the other side,
But there was a wall.
Through shrewd dealings and whispers through cracks, he made friends on the West side.
The appropriate documents were created and placed in my father’s hands.
If this were a Jerry Bruckheimer flick, there would have been searchlights and a suspicious commandant at the gate.
If this were a Jerry Bruckheimer flick, a sniper would have accidentally put a bullet through the head of my dad’s best friend as he happened to step in front of him at the proper dramatic moment.
But this actually happened and my dad silently passed through the Berlin Wall like the last gasp of air fleeing a closing tomb.

We used to live in Mexico, when I was very young.
In Mexico we had a mansion, shiny cars and servants.
What were Mexicans for if not to cut our lawn, cook our food, and wash our clothes?
Walt Disney taught me not to question.
I mean, Goofy is a dog and Pluto is a dog,
But when Goofy throws a stick, Pluto goes running after it
And what is up with that?
But clearly one wears a collar while the other does not.
That is an important difference.
Yes, I was justified in looking down on the poor Mexican beggars on the corner
While I rode around the neighborhood on my Fisher Price big wheel.
They were to be pitied, even though there was more culture on that street corner than I would see in my home my entire life.

When my father was awarded citizenship, the USA asked him,
“Alfredo, by what name shall we know you?”
In Cuba, everyone had like 15 last names.
In America, if you had a name like
Alfredo Rodriguez Monserrat Ramos Bauta,
It made it difficult to fill out the Columbia House Music Club membership card.
He had been going by Rodriguez, but he picked Monserrat so his future children would not be discriminated against.
“Monserrat, that’s French, right?”
In America, it will only take you a short while to become a citizen,
But it will take the rest of your life before they’ll let you live here.
So my father found out.
My dad thought he could become a Spanish teacher
Until he discovered you had to take 100 tests in English
To prove how well you knew Spanish.
Then he thought he could become a lawyer
And perhaps fight against discrimination.
But you had to take 100 tests in English
To prove you knew what discrimination was.
Later he got involved in computers.
The computer didn’t care what language he spoke.

“Monserrat – That’s like a movie star name!”
My sister is white as Britney Spears on the outside
But black as Moesha on the inside.
She may act black, but her kids are black.
Mostly black.
My niece Dominique may begin to question
Why she is not as light as Mommy
Or as dark as Daddy
And she may ask me
“Uncle Andre, what am I?”
Am I qualified to answer? What am I?
A Gringo Cuban American? A Gringican?
Hispanic boy whitewashed in Ohio?
No one told me what I was.
My family legacy is a scrapbook of stolen newspaper clippings,
Pasted together in a way that is aesthetic and perhaps even historical.
No one passed me a flame to keep lit.
No one handed me a golden flask filled with the echoes of ten generations, or five or even one.
How will I account for these things?
Even if I cannot answer these questions, I can still answer my niece.
I will not say, “You are bi-racial.”
I will not say, “You are an amalgam of Cuban, Finn, and African American.”
I will not say, “Your heritage is lost forever so shut up and finish your Coca-Cola.”
I will not say, “Your identity is bound up in varying quantities of melanin, and you better get it sorted out quickly.”
I will say to her, “You are beautiful. Go be beautiful.”

My reflection got a new girlfriend so it’s not around in the morning to help me shave.
My appetite left me ’cause of my lack of taste.
My shadow is at the cleaner’s and my memory is in the shop.
My heart won’t return my calls
And my soul is on tour with Kurt Cobain.
I remember how he looked out at me from the cover of Rolling Stone:
Staring down a train and he wouldn’t step off the tracks.
I’m feeling empty as MTV.
My ribs are like a storm drain catching the occasional used up dream.
I’m afraid to have any of my own dreams,
Presently being so insubstantial.
Any kind of hope in my chest would carry me into the sky
On lazy warm currents of yesterdays long gone by.
No, I shall remain careful and earthbound,
stitching together a new shadow from old newspapers,
a tattered silhouette of personal ads dragging behind me
as I go a-questing for my recently departed parts.

Well, now isn’t this a sight?
I should have investigated the pool hall straight away,
but I was feeling optimistic.
There’s my reflection, bright with the stolen light of its new girlfriend.
Appetite’s over there turning a plate of barbeque wings into bones to fence the graveyard where tiny ideas go.
At the pool table, my heart is arguing with my memory,
Cue sticks raised like green felt jousters.
Heart says, “Linda Lee was watermelon on the hottest summer’s day.”
“I can’t abide such crazy talk,” says Memory. “She was as worthless as Ray Charles at a peepshow!”
On the bar is a telegram from my soul:
STILL ON TOUR. STOP. KURT SAYS “HI.” STOP.
THIS TRAIN IS THE ONLY WAY TO FLY. STOP.