Alejandro Escudé

September 17, 2023

“Convict Game” by Alejandro EscudéPosted by

Alejandro Escudé

CONVICT GAME

It’s not a lion,
The sun over the Serengeti,
And the rifle has not saved the free world.
The criminal is caught, yes.
But do you recall the human pyramids
In Abu Ghraib?
The shelter of the human of world
Is the human world.
One can’t slice morality like a birthday cake,
A piece for each officer.
Dogs to the front, like Egyptian statues,
Their lean snouts,
Having sniffed him out in the forests of Pennsylvania.
I mean the fugitive
Shot a mother in cold blood.
But every single photograph is a bloody act.
They belie the intrigue of the moment.
Ghosts sometimes appear at the edge of them.
Some from the Civil War,
Bearded, from both North and South.
This September, I thought of the World Trade planes.
The video of the first jet gutting the north tower
Like a long, silver fish.
This murderer stood as the photo was taken
Restrained by a trooper in fatigues.
The first shot of him caught
More like a war photo, in heavy brush.
Though he was no Che Guevara in Bolivia
Waiting for his swift sentence.
Later he stands as if dead. Suicide-like.
While an officer, uniform-dressed, holds the phone up
Like a proud father at prom.
There’s no name for a dehumanizing act
Despite the human animal that stands
Wrecked among a cadre of heroes.
He is a mangy possum,
A rat, a worm sliced in half.
Arrested. Cut. Self-mutilated. Bruised.
One can hear the dogs’ nails
Clicking on the concrete
When it’s quiet enough for the snap.
 

—from Poets Respond
September 17, 2023

__________

Alejandro Escudé: “It’s difficult to say what prompted this poem. I think it was a gross and immoral miscalculation to take a group photo with this escaped convict. I think it made me ponder about the phenomenon of group photos in general. How there’s usually an ulterior motive for the photo and for the subsequent posting of that photo.” (web)

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August 9, 2022

“America Behind Glass” by Alejandro EscudéPosted by

Alejandro Escudé

AMERICA BEHIND THE GLASS

Once, I told my son, you pay for credits
in college, but you must learn on your own.
Learning was locked up in a clear glass case.
I recall pressing the button at my university,
waiting for the lecturer to hand me the Derrida
deodorant or Foucault contraceptives.
I’d feel embarrassed of course, standing
in that forbidden aisle under bright lights.
I read Kerouac in the dormitory where there
was one chair in which to sit, the dining hall,
where they locked up the burgers, the dogs,
the meatloaf and mashed potatoes. Now,
they’ve got love locked up behind the glass
case of the internet. You click on the product
you want but no one comes with the key.
It’s so fun to look at it all behind the glass,
but quickly, no browsing, you’ve got
to know what you want! America itself
behind glass—with the toothpaste, lipstick,
detergent, razor blades, those bold colors,
oranges, reds, purples, blues. I’d like
to slow down enough to take a selfie
with the locked up store shelves, but
you’d never want to stand there too long.
So I’m not one to ring and wait—I’d rather
go without it, take my citizen sadness home,
stocked in the aisles inside my cranium,
somewhere between the democratic milk,
the highway of meats, the fruits of joy.
 

—from Poets Respond
August 9, 2022

__________

Alejandro Escudé: “I think the practice of secure store shelving is interesting because of the products themselves. They are things that human beings need to coexist. To me, this says a lot about capitalism as a general system of human organization. It says a lot about desire, consumption, beauty, survival, self esteem.” (web)

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October 3, 2021

“Moon’s End” by Alejandro EscudéPosted by

Alejandro Escudé

MOON’S END

Maybe the moon should go.
I’ll stay up late to see it finally,
What? Break off like a lemon
Yanked from a branch, detach
Like a plug from a plug.
Maybe it’ll just fade away,
Pretending that it was never
Dependent on anyone else’s pull.
Don’t look at me like that!
I’m no fool. I know that wishing it
Away is the same as wishing
For my own end. The tides
Rolling me out toward the dark,
A castaway from existence.
I don’t understand the mathematics
Of its retreat, how the lasers
Read its distance, catch it on
The lies the moon tells our eyes,
It’s trick of romance. No dance,
Only the threat of loneliness.
What they say is true, the historians,
Imagine all that it has witnessed
Over the eons? Caesar’s collapse,
The powdered eruption of Towers,
Pinprick messiah hung, revolutions,
And finally the glint that floated
Down to its flank, settling spider-like
On a plain. When it goes, it goes
Ever outward, toward a space
That cannot resolve itself, the end
Of a love affair, a marriage
Between the living and the dead.

—from Poets Respond
October 3, 2021

__________

Alejandro Escudé: “Would it be so bad? Watch the moon skip out of sight like a rock sailing over a lake. Imagine all the heartache we’d save ourselves. That forever tease up there, that tide tyrant, gone for good. I, for one, wouldn’t miss it. The death of the Apollo program doubts once and for all. The way it means so much and then doesn’t mean a thing. Ever noticed the moon on a desolate bright city night? It sits there, as if it were placed there by the chamber of commerce. Just another public art project. Ignored. Insignificant. Who needs the damn thing? Piece of cheese. Cheshire cat smile. Lurer of lovers. Fog ruiner. Haiku degenerate.” (web)

 

Alejandro Escudé will join us at the start of Rattlecast 112 before we move on to our main guest, Marissa Davis. Catch it live at 12pm EDT …

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June 6, 2021

“House Calls” by Alejandro EscudéPosted by

Alejandro Escudé

HOUSE CALLS

All I see are tongues licking walls made of tongues
Over streets of tongues watched by tongue cameras
And tongue satellites; a lot of you’s but no people,
Just dressed-up you’s in masks, masks on the ground
Swirling in the wind, picked up like pollen seeds;
As a kid we called it the personal computer, and
I remember going to a class put on by IBM.
The teacher was a man with an afro and a big tie
Wearing a name tag that read IBM above his name;
I hadn’t heard the word enter used so much
In my life before. “Then, you hit enter,” he’d say.
I sat there in my boy body, clacking the keys and
He’d smile down at me and say: “You got it, Alex.”
And I’d feel so good about myself for entering
Those big green characters into that screen, as if
Something were happening besides blackmail
Banter one hears these days, tongues and tongues
And tongues—the attacks, tank tongues, missile
Tongues, brutal, anonymous, tongues encircling
Dr. Fauci, dragging him down into a quicksand
Of tongues, and he, the good doctor showing up
At everyone’s door with a leather bag, a stethoscope.
And every window is New Jersey in the eighties,
His green Fairmont parked out front, and sunlight
Forms patches on the walls in the shape of poetry.

—from Poets Respond
June 6, 2021

__________

Alejandro Escudé: “In this poem, Doctor Anthony Fauci drives a green Ford Fairmont, and he’s also an amalgam of Anthony Fauci and William Carlos Williams. He makes house calls and he is swallowed up by a Charybdis of tongues. Why is he swallowed up? Because that’s what happens when people scrutinize your perfectly innocent emails looking for a ‘smoking gun.’ Nobody knows what happened in that lab. Maybe there is no lab. Maybe it’s just a cover for a money laundering operation. Or maybe it’s a lab doing good work on behalf of humanity. Whatever the case, the instructor who led a class on how to operate that clunky IBM machine that afternoon in the basement of an electronics store on Santa Monica Boulevard was a wonderful man and made an impression on me.” (web)

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November 29, 2020

“Maradona in Buenos Aires” by Alejandro EscudéPosted by

Alejandro Escudé

MARADONA IN BUENOS AIRES

He was a squat, curly-haired, pug-nosed man,
and he walked into the high-end asado restaurant
with five beautiful women and his manager,
the infamous Coppola, who father said, had led
Diego into “drogas.” I often wondered how
a man who could handle the pressure of a World Cup
could be led into drogas—but my father would
become enraged on this point, especially after Diego
laid in state at the Pink House, light blue and white
flags keeping the multitudes at a respectful distance
from the decrepit, bloated body of the soccer king.
I once approached the man himself, feigning I spoke
only English, so as to garner more respect, and
asked him, Coppola translated, to sign my used
airline ticket, a readable scrawl, and I went back
to our table, gave my father the ticket; he smiled
the forced smile of the ungrateful, and I took
another bite of a steak the size of South America.
There were poor faces pressed against the windows
of the restaurant, young men, boys, peeking in
to see Maradona, to ogle this ferocious little man
who was pressured into drogas, who scored a goal
with the hand of God to take the World Cup,
who single-handedly placed a backwater Italian town
centerstage, and who famously came from nothing,
de la nada, as if a man could come from nothing,
as if a player this great could ever be led to do
anything, to be anything less than boundless.

—from Poets Respond
November 29, 2020

__________

Alejandro Escudé: “The death of Diego Armando Maradona is a momentous historical occasion for my home country of Argentina. He was a towering figure in the world of soccer, a true sports icon. His life was one of great controversy, his notorious behavior on and off the field, his battle with drug abuse, his strained relationships with close family, friends, owners, coaches, players, and fellow countrymen became legendary. It was a strange serendipitous night when I had the luck of meeting the soccer star. Yet, what I remember most was those arguably pathetic faces on the restaurant windows, crowding the panes to see Maradona. They were there the entire time my family and I were at the restaurant. Maradona was powerful and gifted and beloved by people all over the globe, especially those on the lowest rung of Western society.” (web)

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August 18, 2020

“Kamala Harris: U.S. Senator” by Alejandro EscudéPosted by

Alejandro Escudé

KAMALA HARRIS: U.S. SENATOR

My divorce mitigator
had an office across the street
from a Bed Bath & Beyond;
it was a huge store, and I thought of going there
the way one thinks of going
somewhere one happens to pass by
and never does because I needed to park
underneath a twenty story building
to meet my ex wife and this other woman
who we hired to file the divorce paperwork
and to suggest how we might split
amicably—and I remember, quite distinctly,
the way one remembers something
that was part curiosity and part pain,
my ex-wife pointing out the sign on the office
next door to the mitigator: Kamala Harris,
US Senator. It was such a plain
looking door, brown, as the floor was brown,
brown my feeling as my ex-wife noticed this.
I remember thinking how interesting
it was that she pointed it out, both of us
starstruck by a stupid brown door
with a name on it, the name of the woman
who had just faced down Joe Biden,
a woman who rented an office
on the seventh floor of this nondescript building
on Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles
where I was meeting with a mitigator
and the woman I was married to
for seventeen years, who I had
two kids with, and who was now divorcing me
while simultaneously pointing out
the name on a door: Kamala Harris,
and the electric blue Tarantino sky
behind it all, and the bathroom
that was across the same hallway
for which you needed to ask for the key
and how I asked once and went in
and felt a tightness in my chest,
I thought I was having a heart attack
though I wasn’t, it was more an existential thing,
as in where am I and what is happening?
I needed to take a break from negotiating
the way politicians negotiate,
the way they bicker on bright stages
that are just stages and nothing more.

—from Poets Respond
August 18, 2020

__________

Alejandro Escudé: “Life is surreal. There are these moments of divine yet absolutely useless premonition. Harris showed up in the tapestry of my life the way the poem describes. I’m cynical, so I think it means nothing. Will she become Vice President? I don’t know. But I do know that this incident occurred, and I remembered it when Biden chose Harris as his running mate.” (web)

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August 5, 2020

“Bed Sheets (Moving Out After Separation)” by Alejandro EscudéPosted by

Alejandro Escudé

BED SHEETS (MOVING OUT AFTER SEPARATION)

I wanted my soul out of the house, too.
So, I took all my diaries—twenty or so,
from the past twenty years. And I slipped them
into the recycling bin. I took all my photos,
baby, childhood, adolescence, college years,
and trashed those, too. I took my blood pressure reader,
and I took the white carnival mask I bought in Venice.
I wasn’t going to leave myself at the house.
She offered me sheets for my bed. I took them 
to the new place then dumped them in the trash bin. 
She offered me the dog’s bed, and I accepted,
but it never even made it close to his food bowl.
I took my bicycle, the one that folds up to fit inside a car.
I was proud to buy it for myself. She didn’t understand 
the purchase. She looked at me, I remember this,
as if I’d acquired a reptile who we’d now have to feed
live mice and crickets. A bicycle so I could get in shape.
A fucking bicycle! Do you understand what I’m driving at?
She wanted my father to help her move out, too.
Her brother-in-law would be there, but they needed
my father’s truck. My father loved her like a daughter.
In many ways, he was just as hurt as me.
I lied and said my father couldn’t help. If she wanted 
the patio furniture then she’d have to figure out a way 
to haul it. The moon that night was a harvest moon.
Yellow. Smudged by leftover rain clouds or wind.
What the hell do I know about weather?

—from Rattle #68, Summer 2020

__________

Alejandro Escudé: “I didn’t realize the importance of having engaged in a lifelong relationship with poetry until I needed it to survive. It’s an instrument, a companion instrument that nobody can take away from you. It’s also a form of insulation from the wasteland of the world where you can go when you need a break or a place to quietly contemplate and study the common absurdities of human experience. Every day, we face a wasteland. Sometimes, it’s an aggressive boss, an angry driver, a public or private injustice of some sort. Other times it’s a rampant disease altering our environment for an extended period of time. Whatever the case, poetry is there like a garden, welcoming us with its eternal shade and warmth and wisdom.” (web)

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