An Extraordinary Adventure that Befell Camilo Roldán in a Trailer

for Constance Penley

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_17/Roldan.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

EXT – NEW MEXICO – NIGHT
Green pieces blown into reflective angles, the Milky Way is a tree, innumerable signal mirrors.

I stumble out of my trailer into the parsimony of cacti surrounding my house and themselves with barbs. Tequila breath and bong hits watching Star Trek all day, unemployed and misapplied, my youth consumed in addiction’s muted blue.

I hear a coyote howl. Breeze foreshadows the spring dust storm and I am whipped into a rage:

               Damn stars, you teach me nothing! You are free to
               wander into anyone’s life– why don’t you speak to
               me? When does your adventure become me?

Ghastly as a parody, a beam of blue light severs the desert’s red-brown and the apotheosis of Spock stands before me, says,

               Your emotions are laughable.

               All things fragmentary, this apparent narrative
               belongs to something else, like chunks of the
               Challenger spacecraft washed up on a Florida beach
               ten years post-incident, like poems about Star Trek
               forty years after the original series ended.

               You call this ekphrasis? Making stillness out of
               movement? Impossible without going fast enough
               to time-travel.

Listen, I’m no scientist. My name is Leonard Nimoy. My name is Camilo.

I am all the tequila in your belly ready to come out in a motto:
               be ironic and you are always puking and everything
               is hard to swallow.

I am a pill bottle full of astronauts in a fiery spiral back to earth.

I am the only important Latino character on this, my favorite show.

I am the star of this poem,
               still alive until the point of impact.