The yard is dusty, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The chickens have scratched a path from one side to the other, where it is coolest under the sayote patch and the bayabas trees. I cannot sustain a thought as long as the sentences they write all day in the gravel, back and forth, forth and back, punctuated only with commas and long dashes. The honeysuckle bends under the weight of its fragrance. The laundry hangs on the line, nearly dry. Late last night, coming home on the road, the car headlights caught swarms of tiny moths in startled flight. They had such flimsy wings, kabsat— they stood out like pale chiseled ovals, the only movement in the dark. What message were they bringing? I want to know; or if, high up in the trees, the spirits watch, waiting to spill their basketful of charms as we pass.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHICKENS
As dusty as the mind of this viejo, hermana poeta?
The dust is there, siempre, so the learned chickens
could limn the ordinariness of their lives on soil
that has been fertilized by the manure of humans
who write in garbled language adorned by commas
and semi-colons as if their thoughts mattered here.
Some call it verbal diarrhea, I call its constipation.
A condition where the mind is no longer there.
—Albert B. Casuga
07-09-12