TEXT: A Boy in Panama

A boy a boy a boy on boy in the midst of puddle scum and poverty the dear one a son a son the sun the one they cried when he arrived a son a boy a boy his father held him high days later wanted to shriek to scream A BOY! Though a girl would have been super but a boy like me he thought could find happiness I didn’t find and I could show him could guide him past my mistakes he thought that the father a man just a man, a boy no longer, a man who left the boy this boy a boy and his mother but dreamed to come back and take the boy, take him under his arm when the time would come and his work would pay and his wife the boy’s mother would forgive him but why would she forgive him when he strayed over and over and over and she held the boy while he took his whores and came back late or not at all and drink and the smell of their legs on the back of his neck where hers had been a boy he had been a boy a boy and she had been a girl had she ever been a girl like he had been a boy no but this boy, just one boy, could be different could find love and be loved could give love and see things that other boys and his father, a bastard, could or would not see could or would not know could or would not learn to the point that it was lost to them forever this boy just a simple boy could and would learn these things and turn about the tide of hate and deception and fear and crushing crushing self-doubts that lead to the cruel self-flagellation self-fellation of whores and the tiny operations that are carried out against a wife by her husband and countered by the wife in long campaigns and guerilla pot shots hit and run psyop hearts and minds that he a boy watches stretches to see his father, without releasing his mother’s nipple, twisting to see the two parties struggle and dance and make up and part with both eyes instead of the corner of one boy a boy this boy plays in the dark tarnished golden sunset a boy playing, a hope that La Navidad will bring a change his father’s novia to laugh and spend time on him and comb his hair with her painted pink nails and whisper into his rubber ears pulling holding his fat lobes and whispering as she must with his father her hot breath into his ear a hot knife into his brain how educado you are my boy I want to be your mami too two mamis his head leaning nestling his ear and lobes like a mouth to suck her new milkless breasts and feel the hot plump young push of the curving caring factories of sex or the electrical thing in his spine that must be sex because he feels the shame of it under his mother’s eyes and rough scrub on face and neck to clean away the flower scent and dark red lips the whore the whore my son just a boy a boy it will be rough but worth it the boy thinks in tarnished sunset just a boy I am my son his father thinks my boy his mother waves to a boy her boy she thinks as he plays on the game field the commons the dusty shared grass and looks up once to mami and grins and waves twice eyes linger on her thinking and warm air her dress flapping like a flag.

A police car passes the boy, its megaphone echoes on wall and hillside, later, from near and away.

It echoes in his head, mami mami mami.