last call (a poem written for Jesus Papoleto Melendez)

"This is a war that's been going on since the invasion of North America"  -  Pedro Pietri

El Reverendo Pedro  
claimed agent orange first painted his future black
sometime around 1898 or 1944
or 1947 or 1967 or the day before
today which was yesterday
or maybe the day after tommorrow
during the first to last draft
in the beginning of the end
of a nuyorican nightmare
where roosevelt’s roughriders
in hang ‘em high gliders  
first began to drop ‘nam bombs  
from tio sams sticky hands  
onto a sickly spic soldiers shoulders  
40,000 feet above unholy hell  
or texas and too far  
from his homeboy’s hormigueros hideout  
or the satanic his-panic hospital  
in the Bronx or lebanon
where he had no health care insurance  
to pay and was scorned and informed  
before being not quite mourned  
by storm troopers in scrubs
that his cultural credit card compra
couldn't cure his cancer that day
and he was gonna die soon enough
any ol' way
and if he wanted to try to pay
on the porto rican poetry lay away
they would need something in writing
yesterday the other day and everyday
even sunday with an all glory signatory
of jesucristo hisself or some other
non-nuyorican person of status
and undue other-wordly wealth
so the black on black on both sides
sick spic spirit succumbed
and eventually died  
from a systemic spanglish suicide  
outside the inside of the outside  
and began to haunt the shit-stained cemetery streets
of the lower east side  
like a living dead deceased poetic priest  
graveyard bard
for the societally scarred
and eventually even re-wrote his own revolving door  
first, second and last outcast obituary
as an after-word for all to read
in invisible ink printed  
on an unpaid traffic ticket  
on the first page after the last page  
en la pig latin prensa  
and on the side  
of a car-nation milk carton condemned casita
next to an ad looking for a cure
for a lost nationality  
missing reality nuyorican malady  
that was crammed inside the outside  
of an overflowing garbage can  
made in japan and left beside a phone booth
that was out of service  
and didn't accept long distance collect calls anyway
but had a recently recorded  
broken English message from mexico  
for all to play yesterday or later that day or anyday
that said, to be read out loud:
            One is still a crowd....
            except when there are two
            or less

(not4)Prophet