Ode to the tamale man

  Dear Oaxaqueñan Tamale Man, with your speaker larger than your steaming tin pot of your wife's proud tamales, man of the year, Aztec of the new hipster emerald city:

your distribution never ceases to amaze, but from the fade-in fade-out circles around my block at 10pm, I'm sensing your sales rate appears to yield little hope. Since sales efficiency cannot be your priority, certainly, having exhausted the optimized ad frequency by the thousands per human and invading walls with your own repeated, recorded voice (this is not an ice cream truck!), i have to ask you, to make sure you are human, and to preserve my own humanity:

I hate you. I would never buy from you. You're worse than a bum: I can't shut you out. If I went to hell, your tamale recording would play.

But it is you I have chosen to love. Your song is as kind as my favorite E.E. poem:
"I have eaten the plums
In the icebox
Which you were probably saving
For breakfast
Forgive me
They were delicious
So sweet and so cold."

I hear your hum. It is brain-paralyzing.
How meditative is it for you to go on for hours with that speaker? How much joy, curiosity, release and nervous eagerness does a tamale sale give you? Does anyone run out to catch you, a naive immigrant? Who are your old man regulars? Do tamales even matter to you? Or are you perfectly pleased with the echo of your sound through familiar streets, your empire, which you know best?

Tamale man, no one can deny it you are a robot-being, but you are our most loyal guardian; if awake, you see every store awning hung, clausurado sticker pasted; bike unchained and flower sprouted. If you are as you seem- an existential post-death trance of broken pavement, grime and electronics; striking both curiosity and fear in pedestrians who hear you every night from their beds, and every morning naked in their showers; do those familiar eyes give you life? When people look at you as if they know you better than their own spouses, want to see you, yet also loathe you? Don't you ever wish to one day, you could go home and ask your great aunt to sign a hauntingly beautiful love ballad in a native language ... And the following rainy morning, emerge with your bike, haunting everybody with the new song from your speaker? Imagine the physical excitement to rotate the same streets as always, your meditative circuit - and let the lovers, the cooks, the children and the mechanics all hear this new piece of your own intimate life, as you forcibly enter theirs? Tamale man, vulnerable and human? Tamale man monologue? How many ignore you- and close off their senses - since it is impossible to know you? How loved could you be, if you broadcasted your own self one day?

Ever since the yelling morning man stopped yelling with mad ferocity and became two, the yelling brothers, who together began howling lower, more tired, more forgiving.... It made me imagine the yeller sitting before his meal, capable of human sensitivity. The unthinkable, not long ago.