With summer's peak brooding on this portion of the earth
and thunder everywhere, I walked you to the restaurant with
legs carved from saturnine consequence. You know the place
I mean, it beckons the hungry with visions of the last frontier and
a tortilla machine that came from the future. Carlos the ragman
was in the corner by the toilet folding cigarette papers
into swans, lifting his eyes to heaven. The light from the sun
was changing into a crafty autumnal version of itself. You wanted
me to know all about that process as a function of interactions
between rain-soaked hands and the moons of distant moments.
I watched shadows jangle around while a voice in the air
called out a series of numbers symbolizing discrete nutritional units
ready for consumption by the humans surrounding our conditionally
ringed universe in back of the joint, under the painting of John Wayne.
- Rudolfo Carrillo