GAS Featured Poet: Benito Vila

 

Benito Vila lives in a remote fishing village on Mexico’s Pacific coast. He first had his poetry published in 2020 in Love Love, an underground magazine based in Paris. His other published work includes the editing Of Myth & Men, a narrative cut-up of poet Charles Plymell’s email correspondence (for Bottle of Smoke Press), and creating profiles of "counterculture” instigators for pleasekillme.com and legsville.com. 

Enough

I am meant to breathe and smile, be human.

I am meant to grow, the way an acorn is meant to be an oak tree.

Enough of fetishes and materialism

Enough of verse in rhymes and measures

Enough of private clubs and endless vacation

Enough of clarity, control and self-improvement

Enough of who’s who, what’s what and where it’s at

Enough of chattering, poking and blaming

Enough of alerts, dings and constant noise

Enough of emotion, logistics and expectations

Enough of oil spills, dead fish and dead birds

Enough of greed, the apocalypse, jingoism and Election Day

Enough of mystics, misogynists and misinformation

Enough of pointing out differences and glorifying privilege

Enough of the 289 ways of Christ

Enough of repeating old news over and over and over

Enough of selling doubt and fear all day long and doing it again the next day

Enough of sentence structure and social hierarchies

Enough of spotlights becoming crosshairs

Enough of likes and efficiencies

Enough of self-pity, self-esteem and skin creams

Enough of ascribing sex, shaming intelligence and repeating big lies

Enough of rectangles and refusing to acknowledge the obvious

Enough of kindness coming in second

I want to stand tall, hear birds describe God.

I want to have the ground feel good when I go to lay down.

The New Now

The new now is taking notes

to begin a new narrative.

The new now is more than

the same old shit, imperceptibly different.

It’s an everywhere of everything 

where everyone is sacred, where each living thing is a saint.

The gift is to die dreaming.

Shouldn’t we all get to die dreaming?

I come awake to the history of the world 

as being only about what’s going on right now.

The past, the future, so much of that depends on

the snake, the swan, the maiden, the moon.

I’m in no hurry to find out

where Holden’s ducks or where Bob’s roads go.

Welcome the new blood.

It has new life in it.

I have a feeling about you and me:

we’re building cathedrals we can marvel at.

We need each other.

It doesn’t get any simpler than that.