East Dallas Barrio- original version

Here is another poem in its rough draft, original. Again, I posted the finished piece here some time ago... I was a stranger in a culture alien to my own. Yet I fell in love with the barrio immediatley. I remember the enticing flavor of salsa tantalizing tastebuds, rice and beans and corn flour tortillas, still warm. Young men covered with jailhouse tattoos of saints, The Virgin of Guadalupe. Young women in tight jeans, high heels, scarlet lipstick and black eyeliner a must. Bandannas too, either red or navy. And music, music everywhere from cars, cantinas, homes, boomboxes carried on the streets. The rhythm so captivating- made for dancing but then, not a lyric could I understand. I haven't forgotten my old haunts... the open air market with every kind of produce imaginable and on the same street corner, a mission with a sign in the shape of a cross- proclaiming "Jesus Saves". Now I think, Dallas is only a few hours by plane and these years are not centuries or eons. But there are some memories that linger for a lifetime in the minds of those who cannot forget. Time and distance will not tarnish images, emotion. Instead they intensify growing more vivid. These memories emerge at the oddest moments- midnight, earliy dawn - a robber of sleep. Such are my memories of East Dallas 1983.