Gospel & Universe⛱ Señor Locke

Howling at the Moon

~ in Oaxaca, Guadalajara, Yucatán, & Puerto Vallarta ~

Howling at the Moon - Rant - San Francisco

🌙

Howling at the Moon

~ from Mexico City to Oaxaca ~

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall […]

— from Howl (Allen Ginsberg, 1955) 

who, with dreams of emerald waves and sands of talcum white, took a plane from the land of the ice and snow to the land of mariachis and margaritas,

who imagined himself engraved on a palm leaf drifting in the overheated dusk, yet instead landed in the freezing rain in the long cold corridors of the Mexico City Airport, where he waited thirty minutes, cursing for a cab,

who, like a Scrooge who had given Scottish tips all his life, foresaw a vision of the afterlife in the guise of an angry taxi driver a Formula One Charon smoking over turnpikes and down black alleys of asphalt, and at last jamming on the breaks outside the Maria Cristina Hotel,

who was battered by the oar of Charon and flew headlong into his bed in the Hotel of Freezing Steel, no coolitas or doorman to be seen, only a creeping smell from the washroom and a sewage system for 22 million people — a city larger than most countries, with layers beneath it, like the Templo Mayor, where thousands of slaves and captives were sacrificed before the arrival of Cortes, himself a master of typhoid and sword; all that ancient slaughter fermenting beneath the present mayhem of Michoacan and Sonora, the drug wars against the narcotraficantes and the beheadings in Tijuana.

All these he dreamed the first night after Charon drove him to his hotel.

In the morning he couldn’t get fast enough to the TAPO bus station with its huge slabs of circular cement and ribs of steel — exposed to the open air. He had two hours to burn, if only he could find a candle or a heat lamp (what good were those Bermuda shorts now?) or an enclosed cafeteria. 

Who was therefore left shivering in front of the Churches Chicken, gnawing on a steaming cob of corn?

Who then despaired of travel and of staying home, and was about to recite Baudelaire´s "Le Voyage" to the shoe shine man — Leave if you must, / Stay if you can! — but was miraculously saved by the warm interior of a Gran Lujo bus, its Hollywood movies and bathroom, and heat,

who, with newly-decongealed soul and new-found circulation felt his blood rising to his frozen brain, and with eyes wide open saw in the cubed reality of a bobbing TV set Penelope Cruz licking the neck of Catherine Zeta-Jones in the back room of some cantina on the crossroad from the periferic to Highway 190 -- the Panamerican Highway, one big traffic jam from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego,

who lumbered past Walmarts and gas stations, past mezcal refineries and advertisements for Babel, Las Manos de Orlac, and Under the Volcano, past endless corrugated tin huts rising upward to the outskirt hills, the Gran Lujo bus moves eastward along sea-sick stretches of wavy asphalt and gulfs of tar and toll highways surrealistically smooth, through the misty green mountains of a nature preserve past forests of phallic cacti and retaining walls of molten concrete, with the sun winking through the clouds a seductive buenas tardes from the skies,

who, six hours later, as the sun fell into its blanket of gauze, slid into Oaxaca City, hopped into a waiting cab, glided downhill, effortlessly, to the Hotel Real de Antequera, less than half a block from the zócalo, that vast square where cars give way to cafés and

who realized that the zócalo is in fact part of a double square with a rotunda next to a seventeenth century church, poinsetias everywhere, and not a car to be seen or heard or smelt, and

who saw the the trees above him were enormous and the wind drifted in and out of them, a green bellows in the heart of the city and

who realized that there’s nothing left to do but eat baked chicken in a dark chocolate sauce which of course doesn’t make any sense except that you're in Mexico and you can’t deny, even with all your snobbery for Switzerland and France, that the sauce is spicy and smooth.

🌙

But still Camus lingers, as you listen to the marimba band and the old man with the sad face who plays the saxophone, as you roll your complimentary peanuts in the lime juice that you squeeze lethargically into the dish while drinking Acapulco Punches and Bin Ban Booms. You still can’t quite kick the existential gloom, as, Tom Collinized, you roll the eternal peanut up the slope of the peanut dish: the days still tick by, here or there, the numbers shift and tick; you know that you’ll never know why until the vast eons of time call you, somewhere above the trees in the black sky.

Who, motivated by some vague urge, stands up, grey-bearded, and wanders into the moist mystical night air of the zócalo, where each dark trunk wears a stocking of lights:

All around you are mariachis and xylophone players (and then a little Indian girl — where is her mother?) who with an ill-tuned accordion screeches to the stars, in tatters, threatening to turn your mystical stroll into the running of the bulls in your head, complete with fist fights and angry capes.

Who suddenly stops you with his skinny hand and begs you to buy one of his sunglasses, adding one more guilty spoke to your luminescent tourist crown with his piteous tale of cheap wholesale sun-glass dealers and giant carrion birds and corrupt officials,

who knows all of that but can only think of girls with breasts the size of Salma Hyak, and dark shady characters hanging outside the entrance of the Benito Juárez market, and stray dogs with persecution complexes, followed by clever dogs pretending to be Beat poets and dark-skinned girls with greasy, greasy hair,

who are so disturbing that you bump right into a blind shoe-shine man who coughs as if to remind you who you are and that you're in a public space — This isn’t your living room, pendejo! — and who suddenly remembers then that he’s in the zócalo, talking to Tiresias, who is scolding you like the Cheshire Cat,

while above you the stars pick their predetermined tangents through the dark night, beaming their uncertain wisdom to the sea-green leaves in the air, and landing on the black branches,

who, high above you with their wavy mops of hair, shake in the wind their glowing arachnid bodies, swaying to the languid rhythm of the stars.

 🥃

Don Julio and the Señorita

~ Guadalajara (& Córdoba) ~

Don Julio, gran patrón del agave, traveled back to the land of his ancestors. He entered a bar and tipped his wooden cap to the slim woman in the red dress, and said, My name is Julio, Don Julio. I am, of course, not to be confused with my cousin, Don Mescal, after which he ordered two snifters, drawn from the nectar of his Mexican soul, stirred, not shaken.

Doña Julia’s eyes widened. Her long lashes batted in the cool currents of the Córdoba fan, and the smoke of his Cuban cigar drifted into a fine and completely soluble oblivion. This took her away in an instant to the sunlight of the New World, to the red earth of Viñales where the good tobacco comes from, and to the plazas of Guadalajara, several hours from the town of Tequila, and to the corner of Juárez and Jardín, in the silver city of Guanajuato, around the year 1600, in the month of December, while Shakespeare and Cervantes were in their creative madness and the Spanish Armada only recently sunk.

Don Julio said to the maiden, I do not, of course, expect you to believe all of this magic, as if time itself could slip like a negligée at the fall of night, to find yourself in another story, blasted by shooters of Sauza Blanco or bottles of holy San Miguel into another time-zone; to find yourself in the days of errant knights gone by, in nights dazed with Porto grog.

Here Don Julio stopped, and shed a tear, to think of all the port that had escaped from honest Iberians to end up in the gullets of the English, with their canons and their Sir Francis Drake; to think of all its divine sweetness transported far from its natural borders over the rough northern seas to the foul-mouthed English, with their Puritanism and their Protestantism and their canons and their Henry the Eighth.

Cursing all the future gringos of the world, Don Julio added that the only decent thing that would ever come from that nation of pirates would really come from Spain: Byron’s Don Juan — its author so filled with self-loathing and so disgusted by the freckled phantoms of the Teutonic noon that his only choice was to sleep with his own half-sister to seal his exile and then curse the land of his birth for having made him do it.

He vowed never to return. It were better to live in glorious exile from the land of gloom and doom, and take up de Molina’s quill, let drop for 200 years (give or take a Mozart) and bring back the bright Córdoba sun and silver-tinged Andalusian night.

Doña Julia closed her eyes, taking it all into her brain as the liquid fell down her throat, as the tequila whirled across her soul and the clear green juice of the lime washed away the longing and the pain.

Don Julio added, I don’t expect you to believe (but she did) that light can drift from stars, that eyes are lights that dance, and dreams are stones that burn, ruby red, el corazon, deeper than this body of yours, this delicious body of tears.

At this point Julia’s head reeled over to the bar, where a buff young caballero was bragging about the goal he scored in last night’s match, Guadalajara 3, Mantarrayas de Acapulco 2. She strolled over to him and said, ¡Callate! (Shut up!) Otro trago de tequila, por favor. (Another shot of tequila, please).

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Rant

~ Yucatán ~

[ Queridos mexicanos, por favor, tenga en cuenta lo irónico en este poema satírico. Tengo much respecto por los empleados mexicanos — sobre todo cuando encuentran un cliente como el siguiente... ] 

rant 1

who can stand all those ridiculous straw huts lined up like zombies on the beach military-style and the servants pestering you for drinks get the fuck away from here the goddam heat breathing down your neck like a timeshare wind bag blowing in your face you can hardly think stupid fucking resort wristband what are we hospital patients? sniggling staff laughing in their latin we’re–so-cool way pouring two inches of gran marnier what the fuck do you think it is wine asshole? so far from civilization you can't even find out what mitt romney was saying yesterday the stupid tv in your room mostly babbles on in some gibberish language what's the fucking point? there's a double bath with holes in your room blocking your view of the balcony you're not a goddam fish and mexican coffee why don't they try to make a cappucino like they do in italy forget it huevos rancheros goddamit where's mcdonald's?

rant 2

stupid last resort of cultural imperialism now playing in a theatre near you hard rock cafe empire of the mayan riviera starring the rolling stones non-stop over the golden sands south of playa del carmen surely there's an international treaty to stop this sort of musical fascism for instance "angie" is playing in the bathroom and there is a grown white man in my mirror whimpering over the wash basin at the memory of a blonde Italian girl at some lake back in the summer of 1974 the marble soap dispenser does nothing to alleviate the pain and the sorrow that follows you from room to room and out into the lobby angie you're beautiful another dark-skinned person comes snooping around to try to talk you out of your melancholy yes you'll have a soy latte if they want but for god's sake try to make it like starbuck's

rant 3

why'd hard rock have to buy out palace hotels I guess taking over texas and california wasn't enough so you try to escape from all this expansionist hell but you just can't kill the beast who keeps singing on and on about your grief angie still I love you baby / everywhere I look I see your eyes you know that if this were a real mexican resort they wouldn't be playing this sentimental crap so you try to escape past the doorman who stands there gawking and smiling and miraculously lets you leave

but you can still hear you can't say we never tried behind you as you make your way down the pathways and stupid fucking pavilions and circular idiot pools and the pretentious swim-up bar so drunken idiots can drown more easily thank god and you finally get through all that garbage and plant yourself on one of the lower esplanade levels to look out at the roaring waves what a goddam waste of salty water when goddamit there are ten workers lifting the golden sea kelp or whatever it is from the protected salt-water swimming cove but you are too polite to ask why the fuck do you have to block my view?

rant 4

you finally start to get your emotions under control lifting yourself up from the sucking waves and parting visions of an Italian blue-eyed girl when they come pestering you again yes you'll have a rum and coke but when you want a goddam drink you'll ring for them fucking parasites you'd think they get a commission squawking seagulls waves roaring in your ears how do they expect you to write poetry under these conditions? golden sea kelp grubbing seagulls like packs of dogs / assaulting the grass fronts of love me avenue at least bowie got that one right but you can barely hear the music from here the grotesque black bose speakers on the upper level of pools don't seem so grand now which leaves you alone with the incessant flapping of the fucking palm trees in the wind

rant 5

your rum and coke is getting watery it's too goddam hot for ice cubes why do they even bother? why not pour molten chili sauce over your head and then the fucking wind comes up and blows away all the poetic ideas you had about the hegemonic imperialism of the Hard Rock Hotel chain around the neck of mexico with its waves crashing against the outer cove and the white and aquamarine sails of a passing catamaran

⛱

San Francisco

~ Beach of the Dead, Puerta Vallarta ~

Before me stretch the lime shades of my third Margarita. In front of me lap the gentle blue-green waves of Playa de los Muertos.

I raise my glass, rim-frosted in salt to all those who are actually doing something about the miseries of the world -- from the nuns in the mega-slum of Neza-Chalco-Izta (the Ciudad Perdida or Lost City on the outskirts of Mexico City) to the doctors in the jungles of the eastern Congo.

I know that you could be sitting back, daquiris in hand, on the beaches of Puerto Vallarta or Cancún, or water-skiing over the blue-green waters of Kalamalka, breathing in deep, the deep beauty of the northern pines:

You could be imagining that the world is made of order and light, and the laughter of children, but instead you travel into the hills east of Kigali, toward poverty and hearts of darkness. You dodge the machetes and wonder what miracle might save these people, might multiply like wine this serum that comes in the brown boxes. There simply aren’t enough brown boxes.

And when you try to sleep at night, what will you do with those memories of an infected village, of a head cracked open, and a camp two miles long? How will these memories sit with the other memories of marshmallows around a campfire and the crackling of the tinder and the pine needles on a warm summer night on the shores of Lake Kalamalka?

To all you warriors, unsung and unarmored, I raise my glass: May you, and all those like you, inherit the earth.

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Next: Beneath the Aonian Mount 2

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