soledad con carne is a casually queer, intergalactic Oakland/Ohlone-based chicanx punk poet, working/poor multiple high school drop-out bookstore lackey, poet laureate of the San Fernando Valley, and blatant smoker sharing-trauma-with-their-mother.
let’s call this the SF ramble
someone’s abuelo is out on the corner
of Broadway and Columbus
screaming corridos with a certain despecho,
that’s scaring all the white tourists outta City Lights,
the books that float with the pigeons in the sky
scatter at each lovelorn note abuelito screeches
I listen to him
as I consume the Universe
with a tired desperation
only those with the mantra
“just one last hit”
can know,
I’m out in alleyways
ripping away chunks of my fingertips
to leave a trail
like kids with candy
Lost in the forest,
Post up
MISSING flyers
up and down
24th and Mission
35th and MacArthur
Broadway and Columbus that say:
“I lost my heart
leaving Los Angeles,
If you see it,
a deep shade of blue
cracked and crusted
from an eternal wound,
Please,
hand it to the houseless woman
that trades me Good mornings for cigarettes.”
She’s the only one
that know how to follow
My trail of skin
weaving through every BART station
There’s an old Asian man on BART
His whole life packed
into a little grey carrito
He kicks off his sandals
walks around in circles
flicking around garbage
muttering poems
in a dialect I don’t know
and I scream,
What did they do to you?
What did San Francisco do to you?
What did America do to you?
Is this what you wanted?
Is this what you expected?
What dream told you to come here?
How did you fail?
Who failed you?
What was the cost. . .
over drunken calls home
about to pass out
in-between Balmy and Kerouac Alley
My homie tells me
I’d be the same
if we were never colonized
I’d still be
that poet of place
if I was an atomik aztek
Write poems about our sacred lands
the Europeans never raped and sold
and raped and sold and raped and sold
and beat and post a selfie while they call the police
on a brown man already down and bleeding,
(My cousin needed help, not a bullet
Whenever you see a skateboard and a Dodgers cap,
think of Miguel Angel)
but I tell my friend,
Those poems would still be sad
Those poems would still crave love
Those poems would still not be enough
Eternal sadness is my multi-dimensional canon
What kind of poet would I be
if I wasn’t obsessed
with my sadness
What kind of poet would I be
if I wasn’t posted on the corner
of every Holy Virgin mural
a 40 in hand
Dead Kennedys on repeat
a Hello Kitty halo
hovering over my pumpkin head
What kind of poet would I be
if I never left my Valley
or decided to stay in the Bay
maybe run away again
what kind of poet would I be
if I just rejected all sense of place
dropped off the face
of these alleyways
and overpasses
where these cities
scream daunting melodies
bouncing off graffitied walls
over multi-million dollar homes
of love and loss and home and gone
and buried in the concepts of
is and was and are and here and were
the SFV and Oakland
Los Angeles and San Francisco
Their sun bleached and cracking bones
constantly repainted like crumbling sugar skulls
living in dreams
like coma patients on life support
I don’t know what ideas we’re trying
to keep alive anymore