Hooray, my first ebook has finally made it to Amazon. Ah, the privilege of being among thousands of wannabe authors. Anyway, for those of you who enjoy decent poetry: Tierra Templada is a collection of poems ranging from the surreal to downright zany, an artistic commentary on life, death, tabboos, sexuality, religion, the greenhouse effect and more! Still interested? Well, it sure is your lucky day! Here’s a juicy freebie for my trusty followers: the first three poems from the book, including the titular Tierra Tiemplada. That’s more than you can view on Amazon!
Melanoma
We have become our skin,
shedding pulp like a bad memory.
This is the age of dermis lives:
hiring make-believe artisans
to conceal nothing;
inking into grey matter
Easter egg palettes
that one day wear thin
and shatter,
baring mummified yolks
and stained glass shards strewn pell-mell
like an orphaned puzzle.
Amputating identity,
we choose prostheses,
piling layer upon layer of indelible pigments
and calling it self-expression
which is like pouring from an empty cup
or screaming in vacuum.
Raped by needle flock mentality,
we are a legion of lesion-addicts;
sado-maso stigma species,
self-proclaimed Christs
for a nominal fee crucified
by sterilized, disposable
charades.
But though the ink of the Bible fades,
it is fertile and we no more:
a dead-end generation
of parched pupas pretending
to be butterflies.
The Baptism of a Butterfly
An iridescent butterfly
flapped into a fury,
lighting a million jack-o-lantern eyes
with lifetimes of glitter
but the primer prematurely faded,
and the wings wept zinc.
In the evening I heard a shudder
and bowed down to discover,
lying by my feet, a mummy.
Its fury and fire
had been unwrapped, exposing
a gray skeleton.
It’d been gray all along.
A birthmark
beyond surgery. Silly thing,
must’ve bathed in paint
and gasoline and set itself on fire
to bask in my gaze
or avoid that of others.
It made me question
the integrity of mirrors,
so today I ran a cold bath,
plugged in the radio
receiver
and weeping in tune with the static,
took hold of the pumice.
Tierra Templada
It’s a glacier life out there.
Leave it to the good people of this age
to freeze fire for better best-before
and sell it by the cubic meter.
No salmon odyssey for you Mr. Snowman:
popsicle fingers, frostbit dreams,
late-night howls, secrets, confessions
drowned in liquid nitrogen and rimed to neat
cube-of-life compression: eyes half-open,
lips aquiver, crystal tears and congealed blood
bonds as if some self-proclaimed operator
ran commercials, disrupting live exodus.
Global warming is a witch tale
to scare little icicles.
We’ve thrust boys and fat men overboard
and hanged Prometheus.
Having gone through Hell,
we dare not venture Heaven and bury roots
in Tierra Templada.
Enjoyed the poems? There is more where it came from. You can get the full book (20+ poems) for the price of a coffee:
Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CCVZNSE
Amazon.co.uk: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00CCVZNSE
Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/305289
Tierra Templada 
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