from Huitzilopochtli

Drake’s a pothole patcher on the road of love, and the holes go to the center of the earth where by fire he learns the craft of an artist, hibernating in his twig-sack heart nested in magma-
mother womb—the hole goes all the way to the other side of the earth where hummingbird memories burn bright against the dark;

learns to transform them into

the V-8 motor, loved by Elvis and James Dean. He shredded veiled mannerisms, tangled his lungs in flames and color and photos that tied them into a knot until he couldn’t breathe and had to breathe sucking sage-shoots.

Submerged in war-jungle waters in his early twenties, seeing life from bloody shores, below water where objects waver as butchered parts of animals and children float by, blurred stacks of despairing hippies, corrupt presidents and broken marriages piled on banks; his charcoal sketches imagined their agony, his welding torch and grinding blade mimicked their screeches, paintbrushes splattering their red dreams of hope against the windshield of canvas.

He learned how his hummingbird heart could hold a redwood tree in one claw, stationary in air.

He learned how to use his mind to bring back the cars and trucks droning by in muffled bellows on lonely stretches of West Texas roads. Their blurred growl shaped his soul and he sensed how the world was driven by V-8 hunger and V-8 vengeance, and he knew the world did not turn on an axis but on the rod projecting out from a V-8 engine as it spun-pecked and scratched with razor talons at his face and arms and legs and eyes and tongue and nose until the veneer of flesh that contained his soul peeled away and he drifted in his colors without pretensions—there were only the cheap Mexican laborers working the stockyards, boxing at night in cantinas, rib-stark steers, weedy jack-rabbits with the longest ears, scalded prairie cacti, cowboys in chewed-up trailers planning on going to Alaska between smoking Pall Malls and sipping wine worse tasting than goat urine.

The hummingbird flew forth into the sorrow of life.

Old secrets for hiding in no longer useful, neighbors telling, “Hear ole Buford died climbing down that gulley, doing right he was . . . that hill” and “Nellie dropped dead in the barn trying to get them hen eggs up. . . .” and his parents’ fighting hinted at some part of life maimed and fighting off everything that tried to help,

unsettling him, upsurging his sardine-stew blood, boiling his hummingbird blood, he descends, descends,
                 descends
                 to the origins of violence, to the other side of the earth, dismantling
                 terror with colors, photos, steel installation figures
                 and charcoal sketches
                 undoing our ways to kill and destroy in greater numbers
                 until each day
is another of the million garage-hearts in America littered with greasy engine parts operating on a rapacious appetite to compete and devour.

A time of revelations—

burning clever disguises away with his welding torch, breaking through with his angle iron, slithering through the crevice into snakeskin insight,

his hummingbird heart spread its wings, lost in lilac trellis of passion to express what he smelled and heard and imagined and touched,

the nectar of the sorrow of life,

flames fluttered out machine-gun exhibits, border dogs, sinister devices cleverly disguised as peace instruments, invented by scientists and engineers addicted to morbid delight of destruction,

the hummingbird rearranged and installed—assault rifles, punching bags, wrecked cars—in the Boxcar, eulogizing the tragic deaths of eighteen Mexicans suffocated behind the locked door.