Jose Padua: Ten Sonnets for Electric Motherfuckers

1982

Everything in the world that’s electric
eventually dies. Jimi Hendrix, Frida Kahlo,
Isadora Duncan, Federico García Lorca—
all eventually died, killed by vomit, fever,
suicide, accident, assassination—all killed
eventually, as in a great heavy metal song,
by death. And those lesser known as well, all
sooner rather later, beforehand not afterwards,
and sometimes even now. Is it any wonder that
when the power goes down we call it a black-
out? Is the irony lost on us that an early way to
cover up one’s stupid mistakes was to use
Wite-Out? Prince Rogers Nelson recorded 1999
in 1982. What the hell did you do, in 1982,

master class

motherfucker, and don’t tell me all about Anna Livia
Plurabelle. Was that some porn star you had the hots
and VHS tapes for, and when the technology went to
DVD to Blu Ray to streaming nasty adult channels
24/7 you said fuck it, I‘ll write a book? James Joyce
had balls, James Baldwin had balls and Gwendolyn Brooks
would have cut both these dudes, she was cool like that.
This is my master class, your check was supposed
to be in the mail to me yesterday; I don’t take PayPal
and I have trust as well as anger issues, just ask my mom,
but wait, you can’t, she’s gone, because she was electric,
too. And bless these tasty vittles upon my table, Werner
Herzog, pull these statues down from the mountain like
it’s 1982. Let’s hypnotize the ruling class this time.

Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now

Hang it all, Steven Patrick Morrissey, you’re like
a girlfriend in coma who won’t stop talking. There
can be but one Electric Warrior and you didn’t make it
because you couldn’t make it and you definitely weren’t
it. Now your country is full people who are darker than
you, but then pretty much everyone is darker than you
because you’re one pale ass motherfucker. When you
were electric your lights never went out, and now that the
lights are off you’re always home. And I love the chiaroscuro
you walked upon, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio; though
I never killed anyone I did, once, when I was young steal
an extra large bottle of Tylenol for my mother. This was before
the Chicago Tylenol murders in 1982 and I figured that until
I learned how to tear bad shit down I’d better learn to steal.

You Don’t Know What Love Is

Let us take a moment to consider the glory of the
suburbs, the vast expanses of neatly trimmed lawns,
the loving six- or eight-laned avenues of strip malls
anchored to big box stores, and the banks who keep
our finances and keep them healthy and the tasty
splendor of one thousand restaurant chains we love
to frequent with alacrity and the enthusiasm with which
we sit at multiplex theaters watching Lego versions of
all the classics from Lego Moby Dick to Disney Presents
The Wretched of the Earth in 3D with Dolby What the Fuck
Is This a Rocket Attack Sound. And I am a lover of all
the art from which I may not recover: Eric Dolphy playing
flute at his last recorded concert; a yellow rose when
it’s laid just so on black marble in the early evening light.

Canto LXXXI

What thou lovest well remains electric like the ocean’s
breaking waves; what you break turns dialectic like
a brick thrown through the window of an oligarch’s
flagship store. This is the language they understand,
this is the beauty that moistens their flesh, this is
the alpha and omega of surge protection for those
with too much buzz. Just as book creates meaning and
meaning creates life, it’s the cop who spawns the uprising,
the insurrection that makes the change. I am rewriting
the Book of the Dead to incorporate changes for old
institutions that refuse to die. I was somewhere around
the springtime of my life, wandering the city streets at night,
my head full of rum and longing, my chest full of smoke
and dreams, when I saw, in the cat’s mouth: the brick.

Lestrygonians

To whom it may concern. Although I still express myself
through the written word I am rebranding my activities.
Henceforth, refer to me as lifestyle model. Entrepreneur.
Writer is such a boring label. Sitting at my desk, writing.
Going down the long treacherous American road, words
in my head. Now I sit in my studio, creating lifestyles.
Creating capital where there once was art. Selling poetry
snowglobes that you shake to create a new poem. Because
in America we are a people of leisure: verbal affluence;
prosperity diction; luxury grammar with deep pockets. It’s
all in my annual report. So look back in anger all ye popstars,
business gurus, and influencers of the corporate daisy chain.
I’ve learned the art of your deal. My windows are already
broken, wild beasts know my name. I am your competition.

Rubber Bullets and Electric

This is an elegy for those who couldn’t be stopped by rubber bullets,
who cried through tear gas attacks but kept striding forward,
who marched in love all day in sweaty, dirty clothes like drifters
in search of a cool breeze. This is for those who were dragged into
cellars or thrown into the river, the children put in cages and made
orphans, laughs turned into endless lamentation, curable diseases trans-
formed into death sentences. But this is also for those who took hard drugs
for the singular tone of contentment they provided, no matter how long or
how short, who tripped their brains toward infinity like noonday surfers
on speed. The summer sun sets as always in the west, over mountains of
angst and imbecility, the grey-green sea churning like industrial waste,
swelling the canal’s banks, yellow sky brightening even the insides of dank
caves on black Fridays. This is for everyone who had to be taken away,
everyone who walked that long hard walk because they were electric.

Head

With antifa hath no xenophobic, homophobic sons of bitches a
comfortable sports bar for drinking domestic brew and eating greasy,
fatty snacks; with antifa seeth no woman named Karen an unblemished
memorial to Stonewall Jackson teaching her heritage and history and
her right to take dominion over all other heritage and history; with antifa
selleth no Thomas Kinkade on QVC, his paintings and memorial shot glasses;
with antifa sniffeth no drug-sniffing dogs on the border of Mexico and Texas,
no notched-belt sheriff with an itchy trigger finger and a pink poodle named
Maurice on the Rio Grande River; with antifa no hawk in sheep’s wool
dyed blue in elected office, his fingers holding a blunt, his lips giving orders
to kill. The drone misses its target between bride and bridegroom on their
wedding day; Lee Greenwood sings “at least I know how much I suck” at
the county fair. With antifa Mr. Bob Dobalina can’t shut the gate to his
gated community. With antifa a man without a face mask gets fucked.

Melquíades, He Sees Everything Like This

When I was freaked with acid one Fourth of July the
world seemed to emerge as if from some southern gothic
film. I stared at friends and neighbors as they told stories
then shut squeaky windows in response to my silence,
which made me laugh. City traffic moved like fast highways,
but on looking over to the next lane I’d smile, thinking: oh,
they’re tripping too or oh the basilisk is getting too close and
I’d look far far away. Superstars with big hits and fancy cars
ceased to exist because we were all big hits, climbing the
pop charts like sweltering heat up glass tubes as the changing
light changed into something that wasn’t light, feeling that
nothing in this world would ever crush me again. Later that
year I read, for the first time, One Hundred Years of Solitude,
and started, finally, to leave all my busy old friends behind.

Introducing Feliciano Balastiqui

And so there were ghosts in the house that papa built four hundred
years ago, restless witches and tidy men and vice versa. Several lives
later Thatcher made war in the Falklands and Reagan made love to
an image of America corrupt as the villain on a nighttime soap opera.
I remembered Lightin’ Hopkins and Lester Bangs who left the planet
that year, when I’d been alive for a quarter century like one of several
coins you’d drop in a cigarette machine. I tried to be swank and cool with
ostentation but I always ended up being subtle and shit when I wanted
to be blunt and bold and full of pulchritude. And it was four and a half
noisy centuries earlier when Ruy López de Villalobos named the Islas del
Poniente for King Philip II of Spain, who’d attempted to make the Inquisition
more electric. If only I could scratch it from today like a particle from the
future in quantum physics, changing a particle from far far in the past.
If only I could gather all my spare parts and shine the rest of my days.

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Copyright 2020 Jose Padua

Photograph by Jose Padua