Lunes con Lalo Delgado: Poetic Travel Wisdom for Your Vacation - 229 to Denver - TWA - And if this plane ever lands

Lunes con Lalo

Poetic Travel Wisdom for Your Vacation

by Abelardo B. Delgado

Above, Poet Laureate of Aztlan, Lalo Delgado

229 to Denver

feel good.....i was just saying in my silence
that there is within me a calm violence
for there is nothing i want
and I wast others not to want (like i)
anythink....feel good.....
a drink, a woman, a new pair of shoes,
a trip, a movie, a sandwich
and all I do is do...
feel good.
But others undergo such pains
for a dime to his (la cura)
a hang over, a sip of black coffee,
others watch their children die
for lack of an aspirin
and others bury
their unborn....feel good,
and yet in the final analysis
the importance is not
wanting nothing
or wanting something
but dietishguishing
the trivialities
of our glorified meteor
one life la selective not only
to...feel good...
but also to going
able to feel good
in feeling bad
and fifth cigarette, the fifth a women smoked
ended....I, someplace, in your blood soaked.
                    --- Abelardo B. Delgado


----

TWA

pedro, chino, chip...mas adelante el boob bob,

dejamos atras a alex y a pena, what a job....

today I was inside the white house,

chicno, alex and pete also...

we talked to rumselfd

about the chicano, the migrant,

the framed farmworker, the rural poor

and for at least those days

we became better actors

acting life itself,

chicano and his mama,

pets and his two drivers' licenses

showing us he was the youngest of the three,

we walked in the rain,

we ate breakfast atole....

we ate the chicken that cindy prepared,

we, in another world and in another words, lived

for three days in a borrowed acenario

that wan't cura, we borrowed the stage,

alex, thinking and talking about “quitting”

I, jumping up real high

to see if those below acting all these parts

were truly us....

goddam it, come right down

this minute, god, and slap us

and tell us it is not a gone

we merely play or a wide seree production,

leave us alone of in your name finish your induction.

                 --- Abelardo B. Delgado

------

AND IF THIS PLANE EVER LANDS

….AND IF THIS PLANE EVER LANDS

i will crawl on knees and hands

to where memories of love no longer hurt.

i know I braced myself for the moment

when I would awaken and find

i had not you by me,

i rant over it in my mind inch by inch,

i have told myself,

i was much stronger, I would survive,

perhaps if you had died

i would be able to understand

the love, but I see you,

i hear your laughter

i can even fix my eyes upon yours

now and then

and accidentally touch you hand and I go insane,

my cool, my durable cool

has chosen to abandon me

inexpalinably,

…...and if this plane ever lands

i know I have run out of demands

to give myself.

i one, outfitted, bury myself

alive in poems like this

or better yet refuse to ever smile

afraid to kill myself or others

with such smile

…..and if this plane ever lands

i’ll ask my god if he alone understands.

                             ---- Abelardo B. Delgado

================

Ray Rojas Commentary: Lalo Delgado wrote a multitude of travel poems. Most of them have titles like "From Garden to Hayes," "On Pan Am flight above Topeka," from "El Paso to D.C." Now with exception of "From Garden to Hayes" which are cities in Western Kansas, I made up the other two. 

Some of these poems had something to do with the trip, other when you read them had nothing to do with point A to point B. In an interview with Lalo he stated that his reason for writing these to was just to document "I am here." 

In Lalo's epistolary novel Letters to Louise's main character had an Itinerant poet/activist on the road or on a plane most of the time. Anyone who knew Lalo, new the narrator in that novel was Lalo.

Poems are copyrighted by Abelardo B. Delgado's estate and cannot be reproduced with our the estate's permission. Our thanks for Dolores Delgado and the Delgado family for letting us publish these three poems.

=======================

The link we share with you today is: Complete 9/11 Timeline

Your calo juarense for today is: fosil

       - fosil - Abuelo; viejos que se permanecen en una institución, vacas sagradas. Véase    momia/momiza

      - Grandfather; old geezer who become fixtures of an institution; sacred cow.

        - Bad luck. Expression used to mean something has gone wrong.
                              --- Glosario del Calo de Cd. Juarez, Ricardo Aguilar Melantzon