Mango Man

This was first posted by

 http://yourartsygirl.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/mango-man.html

I liked it so much I thought it suitable to re-post here, I hope you agree.

I remembered the vendor 

who pushed his squeaky cart 

of sweet corn, sugarcane, 

and mangos in the sweltering afternoons, 

through residential subdivisions of my past. 

And as a child chased him down, 

with my only peso in hand, anxious to fulfill 

that nameless need in my early dawn. 

Just as if the sky turned the colors 

of burnt orange and the world smelled 

of incense and my grandmother's coconut oil, 

I walked this path before with many faces. 

Thus, I returned here with the same perplexities— 

gastric questions that bubble inside, 

back pains of my former loss. 

My mother will one day look on smiling, 

finally at rest in her hammock 

contented for once about the heat, 

as I will hear again that mango man call out 

the objects of my affection. 

One day pockets will overflow with pesos 

and I will never rummage through that 

garbage pile of pits, memory. 

Just as if 

the Bataan Death March of my life 

took me down corridors of my realities 

separating me from my husk— 

it is here that I am still eased 

by visions of water buffaloes and rice paddies, 

fish set out to dry in the tangerine sun, 

and the store owner sleeping 

with the fly swatter in his hand. 

Something unexplainable ferments, 

something in my sultry past falls short, 

and far beyond my 

torturous initiation to salaciousness: 

Yes, my first lover experienced me here. 

A foreigner himself. 

A part of that melding masses of ants

crawling into the crevices of the cabarets 

of go-go girls and GIs, San Miguel beer, 

and rotting mango seeds.