ROBERTO TINOCO Duran's defining poetic moment—at least one of them—came as he left jail and began walking around the streets of downtown San Jose. He was "heading down Hedding," and everything fell into place. Or out of place.

Since his dad was named Pedro and his mom was named Guadalupe—both of which are street names in the same neighborhood—the muse emerged out of spontaneous human combustion, and now, decades later, Duran has fine-tuned a unique oeuvre of short, in-your-face plays on words, many of which germinate from his agitated travels around San Jose. Here's the opening slice of his CD, Poetry Pie:

   There's a man walking down    Cole Man Avenue    Coming from a long rough drive    And you know, he ain't getting    any Younger Avenue

 He's talking about San Jose's despised traffic court on Ruff Drive, off Hedding, near Coleman. And against the backdrop of that track, one hears a zonked-out pseudo–Sanford and Son '70s beatnik jazz-funk jam accompanying the poetry. You can easily picture Duran, a short Chicano dude with a long gray ponytail, parading down Coleman, kicking a beer bottle across the street and ranting about something that's irritating him. The imagery works.

Duran, who has authored several books and lectured at universities on both coasts, comes with all the trappings you'd expect from a poet: deaths in the family, domestic violence, drugs, alcohol and that quintessential slaphappy, tippy-toe appreciation for the police.

He asked me to meet him at San Jose's Man of Fire monument to Dr. Ernesto Galarza, the cast-bronze table in Paseo de San Antonio, right outside the Fairmont. Duran is a big fan of Galarza, a Chicano educator, civic leader and labor supporter who died in 1984. Near the table, a few police officers had already parked their horses, with one of the horse's posteriors now pointing directly toward us. Duran said he didn't want to talk to a horse's ass, so we wandered off in the other direction.

Like any natural, Duran constantly inserts his poetic plays on words into his everyday conversation. Asking him to recite a poem isn't necessary. It happens automatically. "The next one's going to be about Brokaw Avenue," he says. "I'm broke. Aw."

Duran is currently putting the finishing touches on a new work, aptly titled A Play on Words, which he will perform at MACLA this Friday. "It'll be a chance for me to experiment with different textures," he says. "I'm going to have some music, props and a bunch of extraneous stuff."

In A Play on Words, Duran will, as usual, unsparingly attack everything about the Chicano experience in San Jose, including issues of identity, race, gangs and the prison mentality. Since he's actually been behind bars, he says he can tell when someone on the streets is still operating with a prison mind-set. "They're physically out of prison, but they don't come out mentally," he explains.

Social division is also a key component in the play. "We need to get out of the whole, 'East Side, West Side, Pal-y, NorCal, SoCal' crap," he says. "We're divided enough already and the media has divided us up big-time and we've bought right into it. To me, putting 408 on your window is idiotic. You don't fucking limit yourself to where you live." And then he lets out his quintessential Chicano Imp of the Perverse laugh.

Duran says the play will not be the same ol' same ol'. He hates being predictable. Whenever he runs into people he hasn't seen in years, they always ask him stuff like, "Dude, what are you up to? Are you still doing the same stuff?" He always replies that he hopes not.

"You can try and leave writing," he declares, "but the writing doesn't leave you."

ROBERTO DURAN performs A PLAY ON WORDS on Friday (Aug. 15) at 8pm at MACLA, 510 S. First St., San Jose. Tickets are $5–$7. (408.998.2783)

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