SOMETIMES YOU LEARN THINGS THE HARD WAY
THE STORYEL BANDIDO
El Bandido is the visual voice of the poems—a masked version of me who can say what is difficult to say out loud.
The mask is not there to hide. It gives the feelings a body: the losses, the jokes, the homesickness, fatherhood, love and the lessons learned the hard way. Across the book, Bandido becomes the witness—the face that carries the story when the words end.
In San Lorenzo the fruit fell hard enough
to wake the dogs.
My mother called it waste.
I called it weather.
Years later, in Texas,
I paid four dollars for one mango
and held it under fluorescent light
like evidence from a country
I had not stopped leaving.
What taste takes you somewhere you miss?
For weeks I slept near the edge
as if respecting a border.
Then one hot night
I rolled into the center,
stole both pillows,
opened the window.
The mattress made no complaint.
What feels good about having space to yourself?
A word people use
when the present feels enormous.
It is not a contract.
It is not evidence.
It is the heart,
bad at mathematics,
doing its best.
What did you mean when you said forever?
No trumpet.
No sudden wisdom.
Just a birthday cake
leaning slightly left
and the private discovery
that I had survived
every age I once thought would finish me.
What would you like to celebrate about being here now?
I know this episode.
I know the argument,
the entrance,
the exact stupid thing
someone is about to say.
I laugh anyway.
No new information.
A very good evening.
What familiar thing still makes you happy?