"Just as some people work because they're bored, I sometimes write because I have nothing to say. ...I am able to dream in prose. And I extract a great deal of sincere feeling and much legitimate emotion out of not feeling." Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet 170 (293) https://thedirtyrat.files.wordpress.com/2020/09/altered-found-rose.jpg I've attempted to post this …
A Prayer
https://thedirtyrat.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/img_1187-1.jpg It is often necessary for me to write a prayer. I've done it a few times over the years while I was drowning in life. This one was composed after visiting a website with hundreds of positive affirmations. I scanned over them and assembled one. Its never occurred to share any nor have I …
Quarantine Journal (Deleted Scenes)
Mother's Day, I shaved my head. I don’t remember growing a beard this long-- twenty years ago maybe, but even then I trimmed it. A few years ago, I tried a goatee but it never agreed with my face and I could never shape properly. Social media had been whining about haircuts. Standing at the …
Dispatch From NYC: After Words
I was also a bit intimidated. Often, one’s mind jumps forward into imagining an experience as a way of preparing oneself for it. All fantasies and projected insecurity. All vanity. For example, I was invited to a reading last month that was local for me yet also weirdly isolating. It felt like I’d wandered into …
The Trip
Aaron*, (Not his real name) whom I’d known since college, a man who knew my parents at least distantly, is now one of the few elders in my life and therefore one of the few I would trust in the way we trust elders and family. We talk and are honest with one another but …
Closure
1. Featuring: NYC Reading My first ever reading and visit to New York happens February 20th at the New School. I always wondered how or why I’d first visit NYC—apparently I have to be invited. I’m the Dracula of Poetry; you invite me in, I may never leave. Actually, I haven’t broached taking time off from work …
I Am Trying To Say A Few Things
We haven’t spoke in forever. I think of you often, wanting to push words, sweet as flowers, towards you in offering. But truth told my heart aches. My words gets stuck, behind my sternum, wanting to emerge. But they flap noisily in vain. I’m alright. I’m fine. I want to say something. But what? …
PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award
My book, Black Steel Magnolias In The Hour Of Chaos Theory, has been awarded the 2019 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. I'm honored to stand along with fellow poet, Vernon Keeve, in the ceremony on December 7. Info on the event can be found here. You're owed a longer story, check-in, but all I got …
Listening To Marian Anderson Sing Go Down Moses For The First Time on Vinyl
Hear it yourself on Archive The vinyl noise floor of a 78 sound of an enflamed red curtain opening to an audience of ghosts filling the black air A piano primes the ether in an imagined drawing room All these years this song was launched in bass throat cannons To hear it aloft, living through …
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The Introverted Stand-Up
I was scheduled to read at a backyard poetry event in West Oakland on a Saturday. Days after agreeing, I was coincidentally asked to read again in San Francisco that same night. I hate having to read on weekends. Can't say why, I'm just stingy with them. So even the thought of this made me …
The Dirty Rat 
