After four shots of espresso in the morning then two at lunch
and one at one AM at Flaco’s with a broccoli and cheese turnover
my insides trembled like a factory worked by immigrants
making their way through the building’s halls at a rapid pace.
I told the Wayward kids with me that I had quit drinking alcohol
but still I was getting drunk every night. I was biking everywhere
though my right ball was swollen.

I hadn’t slept because the night before
I had gone to buy some weed and my boy flaked
so I called another boy and he said that his boy had some liquid Oxy
so I said “I wanna see if I can boot that.” I couldn’t
but bought 40mgs of it and a roxy 30 for twenty dollars
and the dope kept me up all night reading Beckett’s English poems.

At Flaco’s I had just finished doing dishes at Sweet Water
'til twelve AM and when I got home I slept and finally dreamed.

For a second the next morning I remembered the dream,
it was vivid. In it I asked my father what do with my life
but he didn’t answer because he was dead.
I knew he’d seen the same things I was seeing
felt the same feelings I was feeling
fucked the same girls that I was fucking.

I asked my father if he had killed himself
for the same reasons that I was killing myself

but like the girls in my life like the piano-girl
like the girl I met at the La Cara Oculta show
and now sometimes when I see her alone when she shows up at my job
she hugs me but doesn’t give me her eyes when she’s with another boy
like the girl who says “Hi!” but doesn’t mean it,
after thirty minutes the dream was gone forever
and his answer never reached me.

Jamie called me the next day after he’d gotten stung by a huge insect
and we smoked a blunt to celebrate the fact that he wasn’t dead
from the bite and I told him that I shot heroin and smoked Marlboro reds
to make up for my faggoty appearance.

I remembered as we walked to his car that in my dream I had asked
my father what to do when the one one loves is strung out on drugs.

Ahead of me after being dropped off by the food-line
at Plaza las Americas on the university campus,
in between the Krishnas merry-dancing in their ugly robes
with their bald heads chanting, the older brother of the one I loved
gives me the side of his face and stares intensely into the distance finding no one.

He doesn’t have the balls to tell me how much he hates me
that he blames me for everything that’s gone wrong in his family’s life
because I’m the spic who drug-addicted his little sister.

He doesn’t know that if I saw my sister hanging out with a kid
like me I would’ve killed that kid. “All this makes me
want to kill myself. Everything’s that happened
in her desperation.” I can’t tell him because he won’t listen.

He didn’t see me watch The Human Beast high as a kite waiting for her
to use the only money I had that I had wired to her for what she said was gas
after I had lied to myself and was then able to act in blind faith and to
get clean and allow me to dry her cold sweats for the next four or five days.

He didn’t see me wait and hope for the best expecting the worst
knowing what it meant to be strung-out knowing that she had been who she was
from the day she was born and her actions were inevitable.

He didn’t see the spirits that came out of my eyes when I cried.
He couldn’t feel when the dead in my chest rarefied
because all I wanted was that she didn’t hurt anymore.

He wouldn’t have listened to me if I told him that I didn’t want to give up on her

that my insides had utilized themselves
and the machine that composed me had swallowed one of its
workers and the rest on duty stood there for a second and then
decided that his fate seemed better then theirs and jumped into
the gears after him but I knew that I had no control
of the situation and that there was nothing I could do for her.

He hadn’t seen when my thought-eddies drilled out my window
into the sad February sky when I had hoped for them to reach her
and warm her to tell her to be strong and make the right choice
and come home but she didn’t.