13 / Romantic Collapse
Lines in the Sand
The cook don't sleep no more he's running double shifts crystal cathedral kitchen where the product lifts itself from glass to gospel every batch a benediction recipe in chemistry eulogy of biology The mule swallows the mercy forty pellets deep prays the latex holds through thirty hours without sleep La línea nunca para la línea nunca duerme el que entra ya no sale y el que sale ya no vuelve The ice moves north like winter the cash comes south like rain every dollar laundered cleaner than the conscience of the chain The stash house looks like Sunday kids toys in the yard minivan in the driveway product vacuum sealed and tarred Underneath the nursery where the baby monitor hums thirty kilos of departure wrapped in dryer sheets and gum La línea nunca para la línea nunca duerme el que entra ya no sale y el que sale ya no vuelve He's seventeen with two phones one for mama one for work madre gets the goodnight text he buries her lessons in the dirt He could've been the one but calculus don't buy his little sister's medicine so he learned a different why So he counts a different math now grams to ounces ounces up the conversion rate of dignity into a pickup truck La línea nunca para la línea nunca duerme el que entra ya no sale y el que sale ya no vuelve The fentanyl's a whisper two milligrams of gone the gringo overdoses and the suburb carries on They send their thoughts and prayers to the cemetery lawn but they never send them south where the precursors are drawn From a factory in Sinaloa to a lab behind a tire shop to a vein in Minnesota where a mother's heart will stop La línea nunca para la línea nunca duerme el que entra ya no sale y el que sale ya no vuelve The tunnels run like arteries beneath the border wall million dollars worth of concrete couldn't stop a single haul The drones fly over Nogales infrared and blind to the economics underneath the poverty designed By every trade agreement that gutted every farm that turned every campesino into someone else's arm La línea nunca para la línea nunca duerme el que entra ya no sale y el que sale ya no vuelve So who's the real cartel the one who moves the weight or the one who wrote the policy that built the narco state The product is the symptom the border is the scar the disease has always lived on the other side of the bar La línea nunca para la línea nunca duerme el que entra ya no sale y el que sale ya no vuelve La línea nunca para la línea nunca paraBack to The Land of Silver and Sorrow