A TACO SHOP CANTO FOR WAR-TOWN SAN DIEGO

Land grants no more
Boom town no more.
The war is no more
War is no more.
San Diego, war city no more.
No need for the great wall of factories  
     from Pacific Highway to Kearny Mesa.

General Dynamics, Solar Turbines, jet hangars
Recruitment depots
Will all become artists lofts
Will all become free clinics
Or maquiladoras.

Remember the stickfloor nudie bars on Broadway
With their eighteen year old strippers
Maskerading as world wise has been hookers.
They no longer entertain world wise shyphilis swabbies 
Masquerading as eighteen year-old sharks.
Ready to bite,
With their babyteeth.

Now Emerald Shapery
Oz-like beacon
For new industry 
Has godzilla stomped
The strip bars into the underground.

Now navy-town grunge 
Oozes from sidewalk cracks
Onto marble floored lobbies
Grabbing tourists by their ankles
And dragging them into the underground.
Into the ground waters of free speech
And woobly water cannon tolerance.

The grunge
Sticks to the sole of the corporate types
And stains their stainmaster bloody.

Up the street
At Southwest Euro cafes
In Gaslamp former peep show parlors
Socal grungified teens and twenties
Sip bites of liquified java.
Posing as sidewalk billboards.
With an air of falsified urbanity
And a faded touch of culpability.

Fifth and Broadway 
Grand Central station for soultagged teens
Those who left their mark 
On the shelled out Walker Scott
Glass screen 
To my first fantasies of Christmas consumerism.
A world size window now empty.

The ghost of stockmarket Icarus
Falls from First National Trust
At exactly nine a.m.
Falling on the Tijuana maid
Bound for La Jolla rows of mansion street
Two blocks off the route 30.

Stockmarket Icarus 
Wipes the speculation from his wings 
Begs pardon from la seora
And looks progress in the face.
99 cent stores
Sueo
Sek
Tmk
And other price tags.

And I, so-called heir apparent to the great Acosta
See all
Be all
Furiously type away
Type away the fears of my mortality
Type away the application to the pages of haistory,
A paragraph slopped on my headstone 
In some internet-sold encyclopaedia delivered on CD-ROM.

Call me the not so brown buffalo
The thirteenth generation lost leader
Call me Chintolas Jones, nomad of Aztlan
No man
No mad Aztlan.

Empty lots
Full of no cars
Where local grunge rockers
Perform their private little bum-aid
To soup line empresarios gone bad
Are the new meeting places for push cart culture.

War-town San Diego
Now Cultural Mecca in Aztlan
Has become crossroads for taco shop culture
Has become crossroads for mestizo tonguefire
Has become crossroads for chorizo tonguefire.