A Drive to the Coast: Part 7

Part 7: Dawn Awakes

by Armando Ortiz

Sculptures create artificial shadows where white plaster bodies and papier-mâché skulls animate themselves under the bonfire and painted murals transform into the plastered walls of sacrificial ball courts.

Everyone embarking on the night’s journey rowing Mayan canoes of brown mahogany

They kick comets from here to yonder. Heads roll to their destiny.

Charon leading the procession of pasty white skeletons

Souls crossing lakes where caiman float prancing through valleys of spears swiftly hopping through old growth forests like jack rabbits that disappear into the chaos of nature’s pulse.

Persephone greeting the agonies of people whose journey continues to drown rivers, and we speak to screaming spider monkeys.

Peace is found inside Tibetan skulls that are traded at midnight along the trampled caravan roads, and grains are poured out from the heads of pious souls.

Boat burials take us to destinations that are as old as clouds that hover over unknown trails where spotted orcas and elephant seals guide spirits and morning vapors ride the fog of night.

Even after life, our trajectories are clearly uncertain, and the bubbles of our childhood will one day cease to be.

The pitch black pumas of yesterday become the third eye of the rising Huitzilopochtli.

Mocking birds coo their calls, reminding us that this night is not eternal.

The huitzi sounds, and the hum of tiny lustrous birds welcome the morning dawn revival.

A sunrise in pause gleams of morning light approaching, yellow needles piercing the armor of demons, vanishing with buckets of spiraling fire and everything is engulfed by morning’s dawn.

Streets polluted with plastic bottles and trails trampled by rising pedestrians. All is flooded in beige, and contrasted by morning shadows.

We follow the giant green serpent and hide with bushmasters waiting to pounce.

Devouring all under their view under that golden dinar that never loses value.

Purple violets surround opposing yellows in pink and everyone emerges with a stretching pose. The prickly pear cactus sheds a morning drop.

The sun sends thunder in waves repeating the cycle and we ride the ocean of snakes while our mother rides the carp of dawns orange that takes worshiping parties to a day of pleasures and mourning.

We bathe in the amber nectar of gods.