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 …
Continue reading "Listening To Marian Anderson Sing Go Down Moses For The First Time on Vinyl"
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 …
Found Poetry: Uncombable Hair Syndrome
Uncombable Hair Syndrome (UHS) is a rare structural anomaly of the hair shaft and usually appears in childhood It is characterized by dry, frizzy, silvery-blond or straw colored hair that's disorderly It stands out from the scalp and cannot be combed flat, according to the National Institutes of Health. the stiffness of Uncombable Hair has …
Writers Block
The awful virus of it; the expectations of genius Arising out of nothing mere attention to the banal I’ve gotten old enough to just watch and wait. Here’s a old haiku just for writers block: Disobedient poems! They never come When you call. Heel, u sombitch. Heel. But even if I sat in the grass …
Strangers
The day of this interview, I took lunch and sat in the café downstairs from work. The café is awful; the items pretty and sweet and pointless. It rained noisily. I sat facing a boiling puddle and listened as close I could to the reporter on the phone. His voice warm and friendly, his questions …
What’s In A Name? Journey Of The Title
The title occurred to me years ago and for a long time I could do nothing with it. Its not the title of a poem, its a poem itself. The title sounds like something mis-remembered, a verbal mistake. It's a mix / mash of things as I am a combination of multiple families, identities, routes. …
Are Poets Ever Booed?
Sometime around 2000 while between jobs, I joined a performance series named Four Brothers. It was the luckiest of gigs for me. The original Fourth brother couldn’t do that weekend of performances, and I had rent due. The show would cover it. I auditioned and got in. Our Friday show in Berkeley was quite successful. …
Poem Up At State Lines
David Roderick and the good folks at SF Chronicle very nicely published a poem from my new book. Bakersfield, was my first attempt at paying tribute to the family road trips we used to take every summer in the late 70's, early 80's. Those memories, what's left of them, are of a pre-strip-malled, pre-Star*ucked America. …
The Dirty Rat 