If Robert Ford were Jesse James

by Devlin De La Chapa

He had collected a memoire of the man
perhaps one too many times, particularly around
the time the last of the snow had fallen and faded,
fallen and faded like hot whiskey cold sweat
off the brows of dense calculating eyelids
in saloons or at the table of ever changing galleys.

Right around the time the wild foxtail wheat
had become aplenty beneath his feet,
he dreamt of Jesse James romancing as
Thomas Howard, trailing his footsteps, each
becoming less than a shadow of a coward
despite a soft unpleasant voice that cracked
like bones when spoken or badgered upon.

Right around the time Zee, pleasant and contrite,
was left a betrayed and loyal weeping widow,
still frames of horses and black lacquer stenciled gold
empty rocking chairs and holy matrimonial secretes
whispered on clean white cotton linen sheets had
become the muffles beneath the four of seasons of what
the future revealed in scripture of what was to be foretold.

Right around the time wind of fire had spread across the plains,
he had lost the inspiration of who he was to what he desired;
A gentleman, perhaps; An outlaw, first and foremost, it seemed;
A trusted hand holding down the hammer on humility
or perhaps, humanity, but never a true cowboy.  If Robert Ford
were Jesse James, he would have stripped down his legendary guns,
laid down his best suit coat above the muddy terrains and let
the sins of his ghosts cross into the sunset of no regret-

only if.

Gothic-ism-esq

by Devlin De La Chapa

He sat beneath the threat of rain
and watched the chickens peck

he had a favorite here and there,
the others were just props, ornaments,
trophy’s on a life less accomplished

the southern dust picked up and
tethered through his thick dark hair,
the same hair she pulled on many nights
before the fights before the idea of
peaking the American Gothic-ism-esq

a wooden screen door slams against the frame
of a door twice built, he notices the house is old
but holding well as she reaches him in a blue polyester
period dress in feline steps mirroring the cat ambling
beside her legs mirroring the chickens clucking

“where’s dinner?” her tone is broken like a tune
of past regret, lips thin, bare, refined, unpursed
like their lives unrehearsed on mother’s earth

sighing, he plucks up a favored chicken thinking, as
he headed toward the barn, that she at least deserved that.

Plucking Glass w/Tweezers

by Devlin De La Chapa

the sweat of cold beer slips through my hand,
Kool cigarette ashes feather over beige
shag carpeting at 11 in the morning
her body lies naked big tits black
snatch blond hair red nail
polish on fingers and
toes, my teeth grind
my head unwinds

last night rewind
a dingy motel room
lots of booze, horny broad
in carnal systematic positions
this was not the road I’d wish to
take to poetic perdition; I am fucking up
these hands penning words on blank hangover
canvases to create distorted fragments of poetic pornia

wood spent missing linoleum is what my blood-shot
eyes grasp as I reach across the nightstand for
the stenograph but the late morning sun
creaking through red sangria curtains
blinds my sight, warms my skin,
dries my mouth, my big head
throbs as I cannot bare to

think about the remnants
of red nail glass chips embedded
in both ends of my shoulders where her
fingernails had raked across my skin in the heat
of last nights streescapade so I spend the day plucking
glass with tweezers, true I may not be remembered as the
poet vying for the next Great American Poem but somewhere a
famed poem will be penned of a poet plucking glass with tweezers

Tequila, Mexico

by Devlin De La Chapa

He asks if I ever been fucked

by a Tequila’s bottleneck?

I giggle in my drunken stupor,

my age refusing to behave, ladylike.

My boyfriend is the youngest son

of a mastered connoisseur beyond

the vast fields of the Blue Agave

where my body has sinfully laid naked

each day, every day for the past week;

in my own virgin fields, beneath the incessant

of cloudless skies and the indiscriminative

of the illicit sun, I have been cumulated, watered,

chopped, fucked, de-cherried then carried

into the furnace to live eagerly widespread eagled

in the mouths that desire such liquescence;

I’ve gained the title of my boyfriend’s

self-centered, self-entertaining,

self-indulgent drunken whore;

he tongues the empty bottleneck,

lubricating the recycled glass,

and he tongue fucks it with such grace,

with such delicacy, with such queerness

that my insides clench, my lips burnish,

creating a catalyst of pre-ograsmic froth;

the sweet sensual scent of Tequila’s

post-drunken lust seeps from my overheated pussy

as the bottleneck thrusts in-n-out

by the gentle handle of my lover;

my erotic thoughts drift to Felipe Calderon

macheting his way through the political

candor of sexual politics and awakened uprisings

to become everything a President is not

permitted to be, and suddenly I fantasize

about that influential man slurping up Tequila

as he slovenly pours it over my snatch

until his radical tongue is replaced by the

pre-election of his dick raging spermatic wars

inside my personal Mexico in this small rich town

of Tequila in mid-June where my body alas convulses

Tijuana Brothel

by Devlin De La Chapa

The flow of warm Tequila
grazes my tonsils, and my face sours,

the sticky heat smoldering off my tainted skin

and the brothel flies buzzing around my semi-exposed breasts

don’t tempt my conversation with the local Juan

sitting across the table from me, but I give in to temptation;

but as subtle, and as unnerving as his proposition is,

I am bounded to this tragically beautiful place

of Tijuana young beauties and self-solicited American girls;

they visit me in vast numbers these local lifers and foreign travelers,

I welcome them with a smile and a hefty peso and a shot of Tequila,

I open my doors, and openly seduce them to inhibit my body

without reason, without consequence, without mercy, just for my pleasure,

handsome men, rugged men, foul men, lanky men, scrawny men

have left a piece of their salty debauchery essence within my defiled temple;

before my revolution, my boyfriend and I spent hours at a nearby motel

lost on Mexican moonshine and lost in the cold hard vacants of our sex

then spent the next few days fighting the local Federales for money;

he once lived in squalor pissing around in drugged-out pissholes

abandoning me to my own devices; this black-haired-green-eye-girl

became the inclination of man’s greatest sexual principal outlet;

years will have past but I remain an image of a slave-driven impromptu

hoarding the foul of my own stench as I become more unAmericanized each day;

the dread remains of my boyfriend continue to wander these filthy tourist attraction streets

in search of something befalling to us all just to take home and gossip stories about;

the sun is starting to set in the far off west, my ears listen to the sound of business

clamor down in the smoky bar, brothel girls giggling, men laughing, corridos playing,

I hear the unzipping of worn down Wranglers, the unbuttoning snaps on a day old shirt,

and ostrich boots slovenly, nervously walking across the dusky room where I patiently wait 

Hard Whiskey

by Devlin De La Chapa

It’s 11 in the morning
I’m sitting in a bar
drinking hard Whiskey
Everyone is talking but
I hear nothing but the sound
of heavy breath fucking my ear,
fucking with my Whiskey breath
A nice old man, around forty or so
but not for this girl who is all but sweet of sixteen
who loves hard Whiskey in the morning
when her mama thinks I’m learning in school,
while her daddy sinks his big rig in the dirt
all to support my secret filthy habit.
It’s now 11 something in the morning
I’m lying on a bed in a motel room somewhere
beneath the seedy ruins of LA’s misbehaved
A bottle of Whiskey resides beneath the pillow
as the thick of some prick’s dick drowns my sorrows
My pussy, a vacant hole beaten to a tender rawness
is absent of no tender mercy, just detached from pleasure
I contemplate going Cold Turkey but the measure
of hard Whiskey is no challenge from its promiscuity;
I am a drunk, I am a teenage whore, I have a problem

WINTER

by Devlin De La Chapa

The horse drove heavy
beneath their winding feet

above the pasty red clay caliche
midnight black and moonlight white cursed

blistering coals paving the dense trails
between heaven and hell’s gorge

her body was weighty
within the barren of arms

the poison of love’s tempting betrayal
became a burden across the wintry desert

the tears that fell from within scorned eyes
once virgin were thrust between the throes

of the rains that came early in the year
and with it, yielding the scour of sin

slithering between the bare of peace
breaking the fruits with pride over lust

now she rendered paralyzed within those other souls
her spirit resting amongst those lost to the winter

he remembers chopping wood
beneath the vacant of his own soul

listening to crickets scrambling their dead
their heartbreak settling

like decaying cinders
on his dead lover’s tongue

just before he pulled the reins
all that remained on saddle

was the first crest of snows fall
and a bottle of piss warm Whiskey

drinking from the horse who dances on ground to the beat of drums
tuneless within the raging fires of the dead he carried

DESERT

by Devlin De La Chapa

rats ingest snakes
cacti mature leaves
coyotes cackle hyenas
sand is the sky
as a woman is the man’s desert;
barren and endless
infested and forgotten

UNINSPIRING

by Devlin De La Chapa

I have a garden growing on my breasts-
my old man is bitching about the roses
that don’t bloom anymore

I lean over the kitchen sink
and stare out the kitchen window-

it’s going to rain and I think
I need to go stand outside
and plant my soul into the soil-

but after I wash the dishes
and toss out day old empty beer cans
along with the roach buds infesting the ashtray-

a bee has landed on one of my rosy pink petals
spring is coming on my old man’s hand
while Percy Sledge stands out in the rain-

singing

Mexican Beauty

by Devlin De La Chapa

Sun’s down
in the bastard saloon-
dirty cowboys drinking
water down Whiskey
a Mexican hostess
drenched in cheap perfume.
　
Sun up
I hit the Cochise west,
my tongue stuck
to the planes in my mouth.
Dry spit, the hostess is spent.
　
I see buzzards flying over my head
in Bisbee,
then one laughs-
it’s her
loving me gently
drinking me softly
stealing me harshly.
　
With guns drawn,
envisioning the cheap of her blacken hair,
I shoot at the blistering sky,
bullets backfire ‘til
one grazes my soul.
　
Still drunk
on Whiskey and sorrow
blood is the salt
of that Mexican beauty
who lost me in Tombstone.

Red Sky Mine

by Devlin De La Chapa

Snakes hang dry
pink petals bloom

Sun kisses dirt
water runs green

Cactus saps
trees loose leaves

Dead and dying
blazing and bursting

Girls is the day
under boys are the night

Red sky mine,
burns