There could be room here for my friend’s woman, who was once 
also my woman in every metaphysical sense.

Here there could be room for that old peach tree, the one that was
in the right corner of my cell, whose colorless bloom
announced the coming of March.

here there could be room for the grim orgies, languid nights without
warmth illuminated by amber lights and stolen 
liquor.

Here there could be room for all the years of the ’80s.

Here there could be room for the human remains, the faithful departed,
the five kids who carried keychains of many 
keychains in their hole-filled pockets, the ones who would project
the spear of sound into the softest side of god;
the ones who were in love with themselves; the ones;

here there could be room for all the words I didn’t write in seven years; 
the words that slipped through the hands of the dead
girl to found an immobile empire inside and below.

Here there could be room for a light that I haven’t seen again and I can’t
describe and therefore remember.

Here there could also be room for the guy who lulled
marijuana into rice papers while he figured out
every possible sense and impossible sense of the word breath;

and there could be room for the days of running fast toward nowhere
pursued only by the dark eyes
of policemen and their sticks;

and room for the furious ones who demanded the impossible
and stole wallets and wanted to live beneath the open rose
of revolution that only glanced at us sideways;

here there could be room for the feminists who put mirrors
under their sex to glimpse the livid slow unctuous flow
of their menstruation;

and room for the loonies, the ones who never returned from their trip
on mushrooms among the multicolored clovers saying
that they were enchanted;

and room for the whores who did us a favor
out in the grass in exchange for the shine of a few words
that jangled like coins.

Here there could be room for the gospel truth and the half-truth and the swindle
and the total lie.

Here there could be room for the adorable skinny girl with eyes
of atrocious black who made two blades of her legs
to grind sexes;

and that guy who offered me coffee and I understood
coffee but he meant to say coffee

and the singer who was born in Tampico and was fated
to meet death on the 19^th of September 1985
with his cup still full, his distant instant, 
his instant of oblivion;

here there could be room for everybody’s fool, the thief who often repeated
the alteration is altered and would always say he wasn’t gay
he was a fag;

and there’d also be room for all the fags, the queeniest of queens
dressed in saliva and sequins who collected
abandonments beneath the uneven fronds of their eyes
dripping with mascara and with laughter;

and that green-eyed Leninist who surrounded himself with
a jungle redolent with adolescence lustful virile stupid like bindweed;

here there could be room for that little rat that I was, my straitjacket madness 
unbound rising up in morning veins
begging for death, blood, something absolute.

Here in this room with perfect white walls
there could be room for all their shadows, their breath, their ways
of wounding and of falling and falling face down again
and all of a sudden like sometimes memory and speed.

Here there could be room, it’s true, but thank goodness they’re not here.