Mexico
             
I have this fantasy about Mexico,
that I get down there and it's Ireland,
I'm in Belfast,
it's 1968 and Van Morrison has his flute out
near a cow and everyone talks Gaelic,
but it's Mexico City
and there is marijuana and broken Coke bottles
under the lampposts
for everyone.
I can't find a restaurant that serves tacos al carbon
and my girlfriend's name is Lucia.
It's taken me three years to get down here,
to find a quiet place near Caba San Lucas, right on the ocean,
to learn Spanish and drink milk from a conch.
That's all I want, but everyone is Irish
and it's kind of Boston
but it's Sunday.
I dated Margarita for six months and we had sex once
or we had sex once
and it felt like six months.

In Mexico, I dream, the coconut trees
will make me quiet,
will make the whole world quiet
and maybe what the globe needs
is a very brown Mexican man named Juan
to pretend he's the Bodhisattva
and silence the blistered gangs in L.A. and the glass bullets in San Antonio,
shut up the nuclear warheads in Arizona
and then stand up on the t.v. to say, I told you, I'm nothing and I love you.
Goodbye.
Then he won't be pretending anymore
that he's the Bodhisattva. He'll just disappear
in his brown-ness
and all the circuits will go dead.
The bees will come back and so will the polar bears.
They'll come back together and have bumble bee polar bear babies.

But this is not my dream.
My dream is to speak Spanish and watch Spanish television
until four in the morning
with no underwear on
while summer nods off into the swell of dying cicada lung.
My dream is to say,
The wicked savages are all dead and the earth is perfectly blue,
in Spanish, over and over,
so it becomes a mantra, a monkish incantation of the spirit,
and then it becomes true.