Albuquerque
I like it here in the Land of Enchantment, where the last moment
planning and bosque fire runs rampant
amongst fields of rocky dirt and mismatched ornament.
Diversity is the lasting impression, though suppressed by the
leaders of quasi-spiritual aggression, we realize the priests
first broke the chain.
Remember all of the words that we've pasted onto others' sore
backs when they turned their sunburned faces to seek a piece of
what was always truth before time interrupted.
When they quest for unicultured perfection, I know they missed
the point with the useless, overdone erection of a junkmetal
chevy on bathroom-tiled arch.
So I say,
throw sparks if it makes you the real king
scream loud, brother, and when you feel tough,
proclaim it the real thing when you've finally created your
last-ditch truth.
Understand all the time that goes wasted,
while the beggars walk the street like dirty numbers
getting hasty on the twelve o' clock pan-handled sunstroke
groove.
Street musicians sing on gray-dog corners
letting loose ancient magic on a scratched-up hohners, that the
old men just can not stop calling mouth-harps.
Understand that the road you would travel, is built on the
backs of dead men and holy gravel cut from the kivas and their
enshrined mountain-tops.
Have no delusion that the blood-gold fusion of the crimes
committed long before still stains,
and in the night of the holy rain fingers us with white
dagger-blades and old bones.
So, when you cry for your cultural unity, seeking stereotyped
rhythms on the jukebox community,
understand that this place has its magic, and the reasons you
seek are little more the dust trails in a tragic, malnourished
sense of glossed-over salvation.
Erich Campbell
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