The bald bleached Californian and the backs of McDonald managing poverties. The names roll of the tongue - the easy ones: Jaime, David, Isaac, Jesus, Pedro, Juan, Miguel - so the list goes and the challenge increases to name the many: Rafael, Leonardo, Jorge, Fernando, Benito, Ramon, Vicente.
Moctezuma, Itzcoatl, Tizak, Cuauhtemoc, Acamapitchli - these are harder. They do not roll of the Anglo tongue. They didn't roll off the Latin tongue... and eventually the colonialism bred the new world's first mixed breed:Andrés de Tapia Motelchiuh, Pablo Xochiquentzin, Diego de San Francisco Tehuetzquititzin - something you can understand.
Names are the forgotten casualties of conquering, lost in the victory ceremonies of feasting glory or the rewarding rites to rights of rape and the bloodletting of the warrior spirit currency does not get change.
Names and names and names. They come and go attached to deadmen dreams or the infantile perfections where mothers see the enternal spirit in the eyes of their child, the untroubled babe being the closest man comes to perfection.
Then the name - naming the body, the hosting address which assumes the cloudy tempests of each and every civilization, fight and slaughtered and reduced and reintroduced with a new address, a new name for the babe.
"What's in a name, what's in a name, what's in a name," ask the refugees. Wyclef answers, "You sure you wanna hang with old Eddie Kane?" Hey Mona Lisa? No Eddie can't play the mysterious white lady. An actor is an actor is an actor... the actor is not unto themselves a fantasy. Just a name.
America Verspucci, we all stand for thee. And God, I stand for thee... how do you name justice for all? Tiffany, Jeremy, Brandon, Melissa, Annie, Alice. The blind statue of free market arguments often can't see the money that tips the scales.
What happens to the mother? Is she the unnamed deus ex machina, artificial intelligence of our souls, an annoymous source against our greedy talons and incisors.
Mothers have stumbled the streets after their mad children for years, howling for their bodies, their corpses, their restless souls, in order to the name the grief and calm the rash of this planet on the skin of all the starving babies.
Convention is such a bother. The nomenclature disguises the fact that we don't care. Like one would name a sandwich or a meatball on the dinner plate only to devour her young as if were the sandwich or some litter of meatballs.
Mothers have let these children run nameless through the streets, roughshod in the alleys, pirates of the arcade. The many children who have come to know the legend of Zelda, or PcaMan's villanous spectres, the assaults on donkey kongs
Sabrerattling never felt so good. To hear the icy iron clang from the scabbard and the cold fear that lingers on the brow of the opponent. Where you look for them the next morning - yes, you now you find grave men.
Fiction has the heros that we all adore. Romeo, and Juliet. Sara and Abraham. Han and Leia. Popocatpetl and Iztaccihuatl. Iocasta and her kid.
They have names. The same names we tell our children. All the tales we make believe. Those innocent and lewd, those tales we've told before, even in centuries of solitude. Those good days with colonel. The lover. Ursula. Becky.
The mothers have names at one point, maybe before they are bound to the agreement with nature. When the whole of a heart warms the eternity of the soul - the calm of the world rests sweetly on the songs of our mothers.
They do not need names only defense. Their patience and quietude rattles the nerves of only the rowdiest child, bullying and tussling with the other children because homework is boring and hugs are infrequent. We name those children. Give them lofty names to calm their fears. Their silence is a somehow deafening indictment. But lay blame. Do not lie blame. For an honest accounting is what the kings request.
A loneliness strikes chords against an angry harp and my eyes roll back to the top again. Pinball machines of dreaming and waking, scoring again, words colliding against that similar frame of reference - to exclaim that the play is the thing when the sentence itself is the rub.
Words landing into the wading pool of my memories or contemporaries and dreams divided and collided. Things that might satisfy a reckless mind much as the felled tree and man can sit for a while - this is no satisfaction. Time rages on like a fury men cannot understand. Women are seemingly more patient, hoping that time might heal all the wounds that man has made.
Dissatisfaction naturally sweats off the brow, and the drenching anxiety of morning attacks the bleached sides of youth. Where the colors leap and dance across from the imaginations of babes to the wailing screams of sophomoric music, the painted sides of the nursery dull after all the years when the colors must be dampened for the sale.
Mortgages that could be paid off in pickle juice and peanut butter jelly snacks for sandcastles in that lot just outside your parents window? Those are much more expensive now. Those plastic trucks and GI joes are more real now than they were then and they are actually way more expensive.
Educating the saddened mind meditating on dementia aloft above an abyss, dismal heights above the perilous depths of a mortal souls. Curious minds make for restless bedfellows, slumbering into the late mornings when the dragons whip and swirl through cocktail chandeliers and champagne fountains.
The weddings that we witness now are ornate dedications to our own fears of solitude. The loneliness screams and screams and screams like a baby, death chamber marching an all, this ode to all of those things that comfort us. The madman howling to the witnesses, "You may now kiss the bride."
Such a comeuppance for the human web of sheer dissatisfaction - constant treachery in the houses of others but in galaxies quite near to hear, a refrain comes from mysticism, "Never his mind on where he was!." The excited voice in the desolate land - the immigrant hides a scalding fear of recognition.
The negro samurais of the underground railroad do not receive the credit they deserve. You say to yourself that there were no negro samurais.... to which I say, "That is because there were so silent and effective you did not even know they were there."
African Kings, and Aztec Rulers and Chinese emperors, Black Jesus, Moor Generals, Islamic Presidents - words that sting the entrenched hypocrisy of todays kings god emperor children that monitor this life for failing pulses and limited brain activity, hoping that mindless children in prisoncell classrooms still make for deposit slip taxes.
You cannibal legislatures - we point to your dinner table served by the myths of time and the impoverished realities of the servants to your cups, overflowing with bloody fictions of meritocracy and cooperation. Blood runneth on to the floor and drowns the dark skinned monkeys you insist swim to your table side.
What is then nonsense? Nonsense? The blanketed Fort Whimsy of my youth where the truth can find a shelf and sit like a vase while the histories of nebulae can absorb the million opportunities for myth and love to collide upon a rock like, eagles coming daily to disembowel the slumber of the great adventure.
For across the seas when the truth happens it falls to the ocean floor like the souls of those that never mattered to begin with, so they never existed in first place. Creating fictionalized realities to sort the wills of Man - in return for those many baskets of gold to the court and it's undying servitude of the rotten original sin.
And when the court is finished counting the many ends of their many rainbows and they insist the jesters come to dinner the invitees and the menu share so many of the same names: Tomas, Judas, Andrew, Diego, Samuel, Anthony, Michael, Kyle, Steve, Harrold, William... that one almost hopes they are not invited to the royal feast.
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