For Cesar Vallejo It was stale, your bread. When you wrote poetry, crust crumbs got mixed in with it: idiotically gritty. Sometimes you blabbed in the shadows of opera houses but you didn't go in. Instead, you once made a poem about observing a spider                                                                          with a big abdomen croak. You were a real nobody, how you came paupering from Peru, scratched by awhile in France then died, 1938, in an obsolete clinic somewhere in Spain. Your death was like your poetry: ugly and reeking of pain. Who gave you the right to be like that, sticking your nose in street ick and preferring doorknobs to abstractions and behaving like governments owed you something just because you were poor? What a monumental ego you must have had! Yes, it's interesting:  how although your spittle was as meaningless as thin wax incrustations in the ears of birds, you nonetheless stared magistrates in the eye and acted with dignity, like a human. I remember the poem you composed for your little brother who died: it was so gentle, nostalgic. Better than most, you knew: even slime like us can be poets if we try.