airplane poem


like tin pushers sitting in darkened rooms –
the better to see the green spokes circling
the screens; the better to wrangle
the calculus of transponders in motion –
watching, hushed, while
little alphanumeric scribbles
representing unbelievable amounts
of metal and flesh at high
altitude and speed
tick their incremental way
across a video game version of flight.

a hundred years from kittyhawk
to here, darling, where we live
beneath these aerial pathways.

remember in the barrio, how the roar
of inbound to LAX bothered us less
than the loud late night mariachi wafting
on the weed-scented breeze,
or the occasional drive-by bullets?
while three blocks away behind the invisible
barriers of their manicured lawns
the well-to-do worried more over
plummeting property values, than
planes falling out of the air.

how oddly fitting that our address
and fortunes have changed –
yet our circumstance remains similar:

now the roar of inbound to john wayne
is the whitenoise we’ve grown accustomed to
up here on our hill, above the taquerias,
the carnecerias, the noise and graffiti
of all those sweet brown people who
pray god into their cinder block and wrought
iron walled yards full of cars
to protect them
from falling airplanes and from
the whites who live above them
like tin pushers sitting in darkened rooms.