"El Puñal, La Pasión, and The Collective Fate"

A Red Sea without anchors,

a fever of chests where the sun is extinguished in wine.

Look at this vertical lung of concrete and stone,

breathing a wild, uncurled ribbon of wet stars.

Their skin, slick with the geometry of heat,

is the color of a planet just after the volcano.

They do not ask for permission to be this luminous.

They simply arrive, singing, dancing,

turning the ancient dust into a cathedral of smoke.

​I want to tell you about the body,

how it is a soft house for the wandering soul,

and how today that house has opened all its doors.

I watch the men and women in the crimson tide,

their hips swaying with the heavy, rhythmic weight

of their own, uncombed longings,

their breath smelling of sweet earth

and the sharp, silver tang of the brew.

There is no room here for the cold, tight fist of hate.

There is only the miracle of the moving limb,

the way the smoke rises like a blue ghost from the lips,

and the terrifying, gorgeous courage it takes

to stand in the dust,

offering the wind everything you have ever dared to want.

​Mais regardez, spectateurs damnés,

at the specter hanging above the ecstasy.

Floating high, thin and translucent,

not as a dragonfly’s wing, but as a skeletal dream.

A harbinger of bone and ancient dust.

And etched in blood-red paint on the canyon walls:

EL PUÑAL. EL PEQUEÑO PUÑAL.

SANGRE QUE FLUYE.

LA TIERRA DE ESPAÑA, AMARGA.

​The crowd is a river of Leo and the Bride,

drawn by the gravitational pull of their own doom.

This joy is not the wild self thrown into the wind;

it is the predetermined dance toward the blade.

The damn spot is not on the hand;

it is the architecture of this crimson landscape,

the very foundation of this fevered home.

We do not ask for permission,

because we cannot ask the knife not to cut.

We are home. We are the song

the world has been trying to sing,

but the world is bitter.

The land is amarga.

The stain is eternal.