Mexico

He asked me this silly question, ‘Was Mexico good?’

I said to him, ‘Good’ What do you mean, ‘good’?

‘What happened in Mexico picked me up and shook me. It threw me on the ground and made love to me. Then it left me alone and I cried like a child. The mountains skirting Monterey opened my eyes to a vision of God’s immensity, and I was dumb with it.

And all the time Mexico revealed its poverty to me, and I saw its orphans, the weak ones, with cross-eyes and vulnerable. I held the lovely girl with the scar across her head from her father’s machete attack. I met the young boy bursting with intelligence who was trying to exercise his mind, but only had a dud battery and broken electric motor from a toy to do it with.

I watched birds under the eaves of the house rearing their young, and saw the small ones fall back into death.

Everywhere there were children on the streets, working, trying to sell to eat, and there were places with waiters dressed like servants to attract the American dollar.

For weeks I had the shits from the food. But my guts developed antidotes and I ate and slept and dreamt wonderful dreams, feeling and losing my manhood to age.

In Mexico, before the rains came, and in the dark of night, love spoke to me. It opened the deep rooms of my heart, where a child hid and waited. And love spoke to the child of my heart in its own language. Then the child came out from its hidden room, because it had waited my lifetime to hear those words. For Love said, ‘My darling child, I want you with all the passion, longing, and desperate pain that you want me. I must reach out to you always, else I am lost.’

And the child received those words and was made whole.

Then Mexico fed me with experience. It exercised my soul to its extremes, until I collapsed laughing and crying. Anger tore at me until I kicked the wall and fell on my bed beating it in frustration and loss. Anger because events parted me from love, until I found peace in the difficulty.

Mexico took me from everything that had been home. My work, the good facilities of my house, my longtime friends and loves were gone. And she and I transformed an empty house into a home, and in that home created warmth.

Mexico has her face etched upon it in my soul.

Copyright ©2008 Tony Crisp