street poetics
for jonathan, john & lars

sat on the corner her face creased like a blanket
she wrinkles her fingers in greeting
as i get closer

i waive hi too,
'i love your hair
slick back & silver', she sez

thank you, i reply,
i appreciate that, i say as i walk
past her

'i have colon cancer,' she sez,
to that right now
right now right now

40 years in the past & a peek into the future

a father reading with his son

yes, this title is a play on the phrase, fathers playing catch with their sons, with the attendant bonding that comes with that activity.  i've never been much of a sports fan unless you want to count professional wrestling & roller derby.  oh, & evel kneivel's crash & burns too.  other than those sports-type thngs color me sports ignorant & agnostic.

& yet, i want to tell of a bonding experience with my son, nick.  i am a poet, a small-press poet, for sure.  to paraphrase the fictional berkeley poet/book scout/p.i., penned by berkeley poet & book scout owen hill, clay blackburn [oh when oh when will a 3rd blackburn novel be published?!] 'i am a 4th rate poet but i walk the same path as keats & rimbaud.'

i go to poetry readings.  i live in a mid-sized city that one may not know has a rich, deep, varied & long poetic histories.  we have our academic institutions to be sure that hosts many poetry events.  that is all fine.  but we also have the sacramento poetry center that has been going strong for 40 years.  & the SPC features a monday night reading series that even a poet as lowly as myself has been a featured reader.

at any rate, i took nick to a reading tonight to see/hear d.a. powell & marcelo hernandez castillo.  both poets hail from the same central valley city, marysville, named after a survivor of the donner party.  this fact was an unplanned coincidence but it was mentioned by the host, tim kahl, as being a significant fact because northern california has had an influence on both these unique & disparate poets.

i do love me my own corner of the world & other writers representing parts of it make me happy.  happier still is that the SPC was bursting with audience members.  nick & i sat cramped [so did everyone else] for the 2 hour reading.  2 hours because there were so many readers at the open mic.  & i find it rude not to stay to listen to open mic readers.  these poets gathered their poems & their courage to read in front of an audience.  the least the audience can do is listen to their poems with attention & respect.

it being a school/work night i couldn't linger after the reading.  we needed to get home.  i also promised nick i would try not to embarrass him.  see, he's a teenager.  nick will be 15 next month.  yep, dig it; 15 years old.  i discovered rebellion & punk rock at 15.  15 years old is when you start to develop into the human being you shall become.  & i remember my own father taking me to his events & things like deep sea fishing & deer hunting.  while me being the teen i was embarrassed by everything my father did.  not because he was wrong in doing those things.  but because he was my old man & i was trying to establish & grow my own identity.

like i said, i did my best to be cool & not be the idiot in my son's eyes [fat fucking chance!] i did introduce nick to a few of my poet friends at the reading.  but we took our seats early, listened/watched the readers, then left when it was over.  i texted tim kahl as we were leaving to say i couldn't stay [which i normally do] because i had to get the boy home.

& but still, when powell read his very poignant & funny poems i could hear nick laugh.  he clapped when the poems hit their high notes.  i could feel his body language.  the chairs were cramped & uncomfortable.  i felt that too.  but appeared to enjoy himself.  the readers, all of them, were varied & various, tho 2 themes emerged tonight: being a person of color in the united states & living in a disrupted climate.

i have no idea what memory nick will have of tonight's reading.  but for me i feel a bit closer to my son.  we didn't throw a baseball.  what we did was enter the field of fathers & sons playing catch.  i am not a professional teacher.  but i know & love my art of poetry well enough that i can espouse a few opinions.  when we got to the car i explained to nick why some poems worked while some others needed somethings more to get them really humming.  i explained the absolute importance of reading in writing.  i explained a few things in powell's poems that had today's politics & lgbtq issues.  & i told nick i am no expert at these things.  but i am a lover of poetry.  i live in poetry [nick & anna knows that].  i've read a few books, written some poems, so i have an opinion about poetry.

but the thing i feel is this: we bonded thru poetry.  at least at this poetry reading.  i feel closer to my son for being there with him.  i feel like the proverbial father who took his son to his first ball game.  i am not a man who lives in hopelessness & despair.  well, for the most part, i do have my moments.  so as we left the reading we stopped at the grocery store for we were low on coffee & cat food.  nick opened up to me a bit.  he didn't open up his soul.  he's a teen!  but i could feel us being closer for the act of sitting together at a poetry reading.  holy shit!  that makes me one of the happiest poet fathers on the planet!

i remember

a very warm & smoky october.  the warm days were not unusual.  neither was the smoke for the smoke was from the fires of nearby rice fields that farmers torched every fall.  the sky would turn rust orange & brown & the air acrid & pungent.  that smell will always be the scent of halloween.  every kid who grew up here in the 1970s knows that thick acrid smoke.  there are still the odd days when you can smell that smoke.  much rarer but when it happens you are immediately whisked back to your childhood such as this warm & smoky october day in 1975 we drove past a theater on del paso blvd with a line that snaked around the block.  the movie, the rocky horror picture show, & i thought that has got to be one very scary movie indeed.  

modern life

flow of the nearby freeway
                                ocean roar

i remember

the mather auto movies drive-in theater.  i watched american graffiti & the bruce lee flix fist of fury & the way of the dragon.  the children's playground was under the screen.  if you got bored with the movies you would ask your mom if you could go out to the swings & the slide & she would say yes because no matter how late it was she could see you from the car because the film was playing overhead of the playground.  but it was that moment when i discovered the perfect job for a poet.  i was with my father walking back from the snack bar located at the back of the drive-in lot.  we walked past the projection booth that sat in the middle of the lot.  the door was open.  i peered inside.  the projectionist was an older chap sitting in an over-stuffed laz-e-boy recliner reading a thick paperback while the movie spooled effortlessly on the projector.  

a day spent reading/writing poems.  all poetry is provisional, occasional, even if surreal, vatic &/or rhetorical.  poems are made by the human being.  & still, the thing is a poem comes into being when the poet, the one by whom language lives [auden], is appropriately moved by beauty kicking the poet in the teeth.

harvest moon

stuck in traffic
                   a murder of crows
ripping in to a snickers bar

dregs of halloween