MEXICO LETTER

Dear Mom and Dad,
This place, this
tropics, is . . . lime-green lizards long as your arm, crabs
come out jungles into your headlights Splat!
like broken lightbulbs, thunderstorms ---
just wait. I’ve been building up to this letter.
All those letters from YMCA camp,
all those letters from the army about Korea and Kansas,
they were all just buildups. Everynight
S-O-S pad-colored clouds sit close overhead: Rain,
Rain, Rain: red snakes, mangoes, coconuts, warm black water at night:
hail popcorning everywhere, turning into worms on your skin. . . .
Last night we fucked while it stormed while the
Mexicans ran a Dracula movie
in an open courtyard below our window --- just wait, just
wait --- I can’t tell you how wet everything is
Pick Pick Pick
all the time at your skin like it’s a shirt when you
first get here: I had to peel
my arm off her stomach like scotchtape, my ear was stuck
to her thigh like a rubber dart, a wet-lipped stethoscope, semen
glistened like snail tracks on her pussy . . .
I licked them, Mom! I licked in there like an eel,
in that salty, anchovy heaven. When I sat up
there was this big roach, this
big potato-bug-size roach crawling into one leg of my swimming trunks.

I smashed him with my sandal like a tube of toothpaste: pus
oozed out of him --- Yuuuuuuuck! O Mom!
I feel so cuntright I can’t stand it!
It feels so good! (adolescent adolescent)
Our toilet was brimming four days worth. Paper
bloated like bodies in there:
I picked him up still wiggling by one leg, delicately, like an earring
his feelers going like a blind man’s stick and I peed: O it hurt
like it does after a fuck but I peedright
into that mouthcloudfacedtoiletpaperpuffedout: then
sloshed through the two inches of water on the floor and stood
under the showerhead, pulled the rusty chain and felt the cold, ball-bearing rain,
dropped my head back like a puppet, mouth open, digging it.

I have to stop now but just wait, just wait. This
is just the beginning. Beginning:
Your loving son