Exile City ©

I have learned to understand

things in two mother tongues

and one entered more recently

in dictionaries as slang. I have

lived with exiled words,  in

forsaken worlds, vocabulary

invented at the edges of life

and in places never visited by

those ingeniously dodging the 

ruined. I have lived among the 

beaten, the weeping, the stabbed, 

the shot, the jailed and the dead 

for whom God looks the other

way. I have walked the streets

with people exiled, those that

do not come back to far away

lands that bleed and with too

many prophets waiting for the

end.  after so many generations

in exile,  meeting children who

cross the border into what was

once their land, you may now

understand why the academic

explanations for the barrios I

love leave me feeling like a

man wearing sunglasses in

the dark unable to see that

heaven may be hidden in 

front of me slowly reordering 

things. 

h. j. Recinos