Todd Clouser: five poems from the Forest in Hidalgo

DRUNK DREAM

It has been 5 years since I quit the drugs that were skinning my heart
They, I, still make me dream about them
That I was stone tongued and the
Cause of laughter and awoke
Shadowed in shame, blood open and crying

That I had left my guitar behind
In a cafeteria light lit bar
In the city I am from, across from the old fire station

This is my mind
Its endless effort to remind me of what I am not
And my body turning to something old

FOREST, HUASCA DE OCAMPO

Black iron afternoon fire
Ion dance up and out in color
To where
the saints sit high but quiet and talk
And make the rain

No one here is sleeping
People don’t like to have to think

Green is the color of my eyes
Alive like song
Sweating through the skin of history
To where every story
Lands to the lips of hope

I am so ordinary everywhere
You are brave to love me knowing I have a hard time to

A pistol shaped coat rack
On the yellow orange
paint wash
Of this little home, we watch smoke
And I remember how you everything

ATAYDE

There’s a circus tent, aged in vibrance
But colorful nonetheless
Blocks from my home in Mexico City
They say they used to house animals here, but now the empty bleachers and doughnut machines just sit behind
Where the beautiful transvestites come in greatest numbers on the 15th of each month
Between the 250 pesos hotels
And the Walmart

The tent is bigger, a whole Earth worth, and you don’t have to pay to watch

ON THE EVE OF THE MEXICAN ELECTIONS

The Germans
Waiting at the stoplights, no cars passing
I wonder
How they, maybe
Turn things into how they are not
The veins into the pencil ruled line

In Mexico things are left to how they are
The wicked stay wicked and the uncontrolled grow wilder and weaker
And we laugh about it
There is little sense, if sense at all, in honoring
the absurd
Unless you call it art
Then, maybe, if these men on televisions and hanging in cheaply printed image
on cheaply hung cheap plastic on the old poles of the broken light
Told us in wide stance
“This has been the greatest act on humanity of humanity”
“We are artists serving the cause of wonder”
Respect
The act of the surrealist

FOR ELMORE JAMES

The South seems so beautiful in song
The way the daughter falls to feathered arms
And tin stringed pianos bell though dust

This is the world I am in love with
The workingman’s thumbs across the knee of a girl
And thank you with the words her mother taught her

At night the gunshot blues shake an uneven porch floor
And you fight with your word because you know
Like the wind, people take you as far as they can