Last Days in San Angel

"A postmodern iconoclast who believed in the discipline of the classics."
                                                                                                                        Jeanette Winterson

When she learned she would soon die,
she took a plane to Mexico City.
She would write the rest of her novel
in San Angel, near La Casa Azul.

She had learned to put up with addicts,
malcontents, and cops, untrustworthy
like me, said she. Here she could stay
out of range of the cartel wars.

She wrote of the twenty-first century
speeding backward to 600 A.D.,
starting in Manhattan, her home,
ending in Mecca, the planet dying.

She drank after working and liked
to fuck the neighbor boys who had
the time when she found them in.
Fucking she never got enough of.

This was her novel of shame and gore.
The religious wars.  Blood and money
when neither would matter anymore.
She thought to call it "Cross of Bone."

To end with, she gave up needles
and reefers, sipped El Pacifico,
pulque when she needed the jolt.
She hung around the carnaval

across the grass and in the cantina
until the taberna opened its doors.
She called all her friends at home;
those never there she gave up on.

Amassing a phenomenal phone bill
when lucky enough to get through,
she listened more than talked, proud
of keeping out the words of death.

Her book would prophesy the clocks
stopping to begin the red rivers
flowing. She climbed into bed naked,
her ink slowing to its crimson shade.

(13-16 August 2014)

copyright by Floyce Alexander