Baddingfield

From sealed bus windows the derelict cannot lick you,

and you find yourself in Salvador,

five hands in your pockets,

only one your own.

Desperation swarms to you,

in the city at polar ends with its beginning.

So we suck ourselves back to seventh floor balconies,

and dream their open hands, hollow eyes, and the place it once was.

A place where a leather-tin man was once-a-walking,

his only vocal, his leather-tin.

-

You sleep forward now,

grinding and shaking into town,

miles from where the train guard threw your cervaja out the window,

as if the hills could open it, sip it,

to a high walled un-hostile hostel.

A salad of once scattered fruits.

The Latvian in the tracksuit who cannot stop to breathe it in,

the stoner from Bristol - a cartoon who shares our puff.

The German girl who limps and the French that do not smile,

all stay here for a while.

-

Equipetrol, Santa-Cruz,

fakey-sluts-maybe-hookers,

wear transy-pansy suits,

writhe from arms to loot,

scooting over issues of payment,

only to lament a time - one son back - Samaipata,

where the law came to shoot the bandit down.

So, Ernesto squiggled down that canyon,

made the king look a clown,

even if found under rock, shot,

thieved of hands and buried in secret sands.

Blood still trickles down that canyon,

and paints the image of our sanction.

-

Oh Samaipata!  Your two hundred natives can make a cross,

but it can’t repay the cost,

of thousands killed on rock,

they themselves had carved - the channels for their lives - then blood,

foreign babies in their wives.

Many sons forward now,

bikers bump by,

clumps of dirt in eye,

using mis-shaped toilet cubicles,

they stop at what is beautiful.

The leading wheel points to their freedom.

-

Shoebox of strange meats,

old bus - worn seats.

The Indian with the cane,

wants to know your nombre.

He comes from where you look,

farmed traces of his life,

inscribe the mountainsides.

His leather face denotes no crime.

-

In Uyuni we serve our time,

a cracky room,

bonus black cat.

“We didn’t pay for that!”

He’s a vessel for the pooey sickness,

that one-by-one struck us down.

Pooey food, pooey water, pooey guts, pooey paper, a pooey caper!

Pooey floors, pooey hands, all round pooey lands!

A pooey bed where you rest your pooey head,

to suck in thirty three years of mattress,

near the pooey power socket,

without a powerful point to make our generations gifts (or burdens) buzz and cry,

“OUR LIPS ARE FUCKED!”

Lets hit the sky,

where it meets a salty plane.

All this before we die a splinter induced death,

or perhaps from lack of breath,

but either end,

relieves us of our pooey den.