Tex-Mex Evening, and: Blue Sunday

Tex-Mex Evening

A discussion on "cocktail culture"
doesn't stop the guest psychic
from talking of old Cobra Women
films. Reggae music - for eating rice?

The waiter's crotch is a stuffed piñata.
Thunder follows us home, one more
aging monologist in the dark. So many
sung love letters to hear. I fall asleep:

I'm trying on crosses in Las Cruces
but cross-eyed angels....Lightning
sets off car alarms and I live on a street
of dark and screaming machines.

Blue Sunday

I wish Octavio Paz had written
a poem called "A Passionate
Defense for the Color Blue
in Light's Morning Beard."

I wish wishing were illegal
so there might be a black
market for thought. Why does
the impossible or the improbable

seduce? My desk is the museum
of this moment: blue spillage
of passion and accumulation
in papers, books, unopened bills,

notes, drafts and old newspapers.
Father, I'm not even a footnote.
Time for that Sunday morning
walk for news of the world as

I see the world. In Italian movies,
men are God's rivals. The dead can't
add anything to their Collected
Works, not even through seances.