I like this, too. I think it would benefit from a slightly leaner diction.
More like, I don't know, Frederick Pollack's.

jd

On 1/9/07, Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> I like this.  You can smell the place - and an old-timer like me can
> remember the time.  In your first section you're echoing Burroughs - I
> forget the novel, probably Nova Express, but the passage began "Rock and
> roll juvenile delinquents" and ended "shit on the floor of the United
> Nations and wipe their ass with treaties, pacts, alliances."  This isn't a
> criticism; it is a perfect source to echo in this passage.  Peculiarly
> just;
> in writing Burroughs was grafting Third World realities onto First.  I'm
> wondering if you might put this more third-person, broadly focused section
> AFTER the autobiographical material - end the poem with it.
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Kenneth Wolman" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Monday, January 08, 2007 11:59 PM
> Subject: "Tenochtitlan, 1967"
>
>
> > Why not?  I stay far closer to the ground than Fred, but this is part of
> > my "I was so stoned I can't remember much" travelogue.  Inca Tours will
> > never hire me as a guide.
> >
> > kw
> >
> > TENOCHTITLAN, 1967
> >
> >                 Omeyocan and the Mictlan are Aztec conceptions of heaven
> > and hell.
> >                 Tenochtitlan is the Aztec name of Mexico City.
> >                1
> >
> > In the savage community of their predawn dreaming,
> > the street boys overrun Chapultepec Park and swarm
> > through the Anthropology Museum, intruders
> > in the perfect heaven of Omeyocan.
> > They shatter the glass cases and sack
> > the feathered headpieces and sacrificial
> > obsidian knives of the priests.  They stand
> > on the Paseo in the fumes of a workday morning
> > in the heart of the extinct crater of Tenochtitlan
> > while the schools are in session,
> > selling National Lottery tickets and stale cigarettes
> > that coat the tongue with the taste of defeat
> > sown deep in the soil of the unfinished countryside
> > glimpsed like a movie from our car windows
> > from the old Acapulco road.
> >
> > A child with the memory of princes in his face
> > stands by the roadside, scanning license plates.
> > When he sees a Norteamericano plate,
> > he dangles by the tail an enormous iguana,
> > flaps it at us, and yells things we cannot understand.
> > He may be telling us either to buy his iguana,
> > give him money anyway, or go fuck ourselves.
> >
> > 2
> >
> > Mexico City is our drugged-out gape-show, the world beyond the world.
> > Our only contact with what we've left is a newspaper headline:
> > "Jayne Mansfield, Reina de la Cine, Muerta, Decapitata!"
> >
> > At night we do drugs, go to restaurants,
> > clean well-lighted places, eat and get drunk.
> > Even seeing a cat run over by a car, hearing
> > the shriek and gasp as it dies in front of us,
> > changes nothing but the need to escape.
> > "I wish I had my soma!"
> > Mexico between us surfaces our elemental:
> > we suck margaritas that fit nicely inside
> > the slippery biftec dinners that snuggle comfortably
> > on a mattress of predinner Seconols
> > emptied onto nightstands and snorted through banknotes,
> > go back to our room, and fuck for hours, blindly.
> > She is loud and the street boys squat,
> > listening by the open windows.
> > In the morning we find lagoons of cum,
> > still damp, where they have knelt.
> > Thank God no one has a Polaroid.
> > I think it is hilarious to be someone's inspiration;
> > her face shudders and falls.  She cannot
> > remember us together at one that morning.
> >
> > 3
> >
> > We go to the Palacio de Bellas Artes, to the opera,
> > "Rigoletto" with a no-name but adequate cast,
> > and afterwards compose reality:
> > the morality opera of social justice,
> > for the hunchbacks and virgins of the Distrito Federal,
> > a lament for the children who will never learn
> > to read the language of Lorca or
> > would refer to him as that "maricon,"
> > the street boys we envision sitting by night
> > in the Underworld of the Mictlan,
> > `round gray rice and beans, cursing us all, or laughing
> > at the touristas with their storebought pills.
> > And driving North, we say "Lleno, por favor"
> > to the pump attendant in a Pemex station,
> > but watch him with the eyes of condors
> > to make sure he isn't ripping us off.
> >
> > KTW/7-94 with some words changed
> >
> > --
> > --------------------
> > Ken Wolman   andreachenier.net        rainermaria.typepad.com
> >
> > DO NOT ADJUST YOUR MIND: IT IS REALITY THAT IS MALFUNCTIONING
> >
>



-- 
Joseph Duemer
Professor of Humanities
Clarkson University
[sharpsand.net]