pink Mai one

    You can even harvest it from the floor at dawn. That harsh Asphalt Flower. When the streets are not so dead and the people not so gone, there's that little plastic breath that someone has forgotten or let drop out of weariness. You can get it anywhere else before, of course. Don't need to hide that much. Guess a pocket or a hand, bet a price. Lick, dip, drink. The noon gets fueled up as you become field and crowd. And at some point you get back to your flat, with your jaw knocked out, a sense of boredom perhaps, your arms weight and your feet weight as well, you let yourself fall into the bed and gesticulate the air with your tired arm until you reach for your worn-out blanket that some hustle last week has burned with a cigarette. He didn't intent to, he just didn't mind the ashes and that's how... And do you ever think about delivering children to this world or to that city or that bitch? Did you know there are snipers on the roofs outside with their only eye wide open spilling out fire? Have you read about the girl, they kicked her head like a rugby ball with their heavy boots, heavy like a heartless cyborg they are planning to build in the near future or past? You will read about that tomorrow anyway, when you wake up with your tongue so dried as sandpaper, your arms still tired, your heart just pumping enough for you to reach to the internet device. You will learn that she had tattooed pink Mai one in her tongue and that she was showing them her tongue with smile and happy, with a rose still attached to its long stem between her boobs and down her trousers, with each hype on the street quietly exciting her clitoris. And what about back home? When you go there to your sadness and you learn about the thefts and the prostitution around you, the prostitution where it is not wanted and where it was never necessary but indolence made it necessary. You remember those family trees you used to draw on the streets with a white chalk, and you learn the fathers and the uncles and the big cousins are also drawing their long white lines up the trunk down to the leaves playing so free in the nearby square. Every night some walk back home. You can guess a dark shadow on that dark dark night. A night made of hands you know. If you are not stepping on the floor it looks like you can beat your shadow. That's why I jump up the stairs to my house back home, and then I shut the heavy door and not in my house but usually a jesus christ sign or something blesses you so there isn't any more night anymore.

Tijeras

    Around the 1600s a gang was shipped away. It was likely comprised by peoples of the worst kind. That was the age of the conquistadores in what was later called the wild west and now plainly the west. They were led by Coronado or Oñate guys in suicide seeks for gold up north the Neo Méxican desert. I can't help but picturing something close to Aguirre's expedition in Herzog's film Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Indeed, I visualize something worst.
    Those gangsters, criminals, renegades of their homelands didn't find any gold and some survivors to the long marches settled down around the Santa Fe area just to endure a torment similar to the fictional 40-year long Jew fable in the desert. Only this one for real and longer, with the whole folk continually at the edge of starvation.
    They were just the first ones. Waves of renegados kept coming. Unlike the original ones, the later wouldn't necessary be convicts or mass murderers anymore, but disgraced families striving for a better life. The frontiers here don't matter, despite what politicians say. To be precise, they matter at the individual scale, at which human evil conjures itself to craft some living hell. But at a larger scale people come and go and they stay and go again. And you have these that remain since 400 years ago. These trying to trace a dividing line between us and them, inside a country where everything is mixed together. And they do so as in any war, as you do to mark any frontier: with a flag. In this case, with the Spanish flags.
    Every once a year the great, great, ..., great grandsons of the pioneers parade around the Santa Fe plaza showing off the coat of arms of their families, wearing funny costumes, and looking proud and down on the more recent wetbacks. They hold themselves as the pure race, and their language is heralded as the pristine, Cervantine Spanish. They despise the wets as fool, lazy, and degraded versions of their blood after they were mixed with some Xocolatectl Aztec wives bellow the river.

    As in Herzog's Aguirre, the role of the church can't be dismissed -- «You know, my child, for the good of our Lord, the church was always on the side of the strong.» When I moved into the gas station I noted all the paintings of saints and crosses and our lord jesus christ. It was a pitiful station with a little side food store, somewhere at the route 66 at its passing by Tijeras. So decadent and filthy that I immediately loved it. "Where are you from, Sir?" People call me Sir here, specially after I grew my Movember mustache. "Spain. " It hurts to say that word describing myself. All the sins my country is responsible of weight too much on the tip of my tongue. "¡Oh! ¡España! ¡Mis antepasados vinieron de allí! ¡De Lorca, Murcia! ", said the man behind the counter. "Ah sí? Sus padres? Sus abuelos? " "Noo, mis antepasados en el 1610. " He said proudly how his ancestors were something like the governors at the lands on war -- outsiders of the Spanish crown anyway, I guessed. "Nosotros fuimos de visita a España hace años" the woman said from behind, her eyes wide open and overflowing with hope "con el Padre, ¿sabe? El Sacerdote. " They were talking with a Méxican accent, or with an accent that I couldn't tell apart from the Méxican anyway. And they were happy with my presence and they saw how very important their place on earth had been for these 400 years and "¡Buen viaje, Señor!" they said and "no se olviden que nosotros estamos aquí" and I left weaving bye and I drove away and looked back in the rear-view mirror. The gas station, diminished in its reflection, laid pathetic as if seeded deep on the dirty snow, abandoned forever in the empty desert as a spaceship drifting away and with its last two survivors trapped in, the ambassadors of a kingdom that never existed.