Ode to Guillermo (the virus, the dancer, the mexican, the god)

I'm physically woken up by your alarm,
7:30 sharp.
My consciousness can escape la cumbia from the box,
but the broken hymn that escapes your straining back,
it cannot.

The sun that warms me, as I sit and sip my morning tea,
is the violent witness that saw you leave-
home, a mango and an avocado tree, piojo the dog-
and your loved ones behind, as you came up north to find
an unspoken promise of a better life.

You packed a thousand stories, a dozen pictures
and as many hugs and kisses. Under the cover of darkness
you left and saw it all fade in the distance.
I would imagine that pictures and calls
bless you with their grace. At times as I'm
on my way home; I see you leaving work
ready to start your inebriated tango/walk up our block,
always at a steady pace.
I realize, from a seat on a bus,
that still frames and calls just aren't enough.
So you hit the bottle, and make the sidewalk
your dance floor, sipping cuervo, patron, cerveza or ron.
Telling it how it feels to walk where you reside,
and never fully make it home.

As you lift milk crate boxes, and your boss watches
for strawberries that may find their way into your mouth
I ask myself how does guillermo live in that house?
That empty space within four walls...
What of the avocado and mango trees you've left in your backyard?
Do you miss them as they miss you?
Piojo y los muchachos
Do you miss them as they miss their absent father?

My curiosity by silence must abide.
Id like to ask but I hate to bother.
I've seen dry flesh tears escape your eyes,
when asked about the distance.
So I let my curiosity fade into the back of my mind without persistance,
like home faded from your sight, the night you left it all behind.

Silence became the last string attached to sanity.
I've picked this much up. As have your torn blacktop converses,
whose flapping sole and few holes in silence persist
so that brand new kicks can arrive in the form of a kiss,
at your children's feet as they are needed.
Your rugged and torn, dirty and worn
blacktop converses in silence persist
to let your children know
their father exists and that their every need is thought of
and will be met, but nothing tangible can help them comprehend
why papa left.

A country formed on the efforts of immigrants,
threatens to expulse you, as if you were a virus.
They call you illegal alien, as if you arrived from another planet,
as if your body didn't hold approximately 5-6 liters of blood,
as if your eyes did not blink about 22 times a minute,
as if you never looked up, with tears in your eyes,
as we all have in a moment of helplessness and desolation,
like a starless sky painted on a lonely night.

Guillermo,
Citizen of nowhere,
refugee of no place,
this ode is for you.
If you feel as if a part of you died
when you began your odyssey up north,
I give you this poem, it's an attempt
to immortalize you through words.
This, is a sculpture made to honor you
and your permanent light brown tan,
because you're a god, in your own right,
waltz/walking among man.