Every Night Is Halloween

It’s a scary season. Halloween’s coming. The March to Keep Fear Alive will be Saturday in D.C. and the Tea Party takes its best shot on Election Day.

As I thumbed through Light in All Directions, I realized, this season belongs to me. I have lots of poems about vampires, ghosts and nightmares. Here’s one inspired by several shakedowns while working the late shift in LA during the 1980s:

After Dusk

Oh-no, my mistaken identity.
Police believe they’ve profiled me
but don’t know my vampiric mind.

I rationalized my belief in flesh,
blood and love. Just because
I wear sunglasses and keep to the shade,

left my home one August night
to split open hearts with mine, doesn’t mean
the other creature will break free of my skin.

I never needed a mirror as a mask;
nevertheless, last night I gazed into the police
as they shoved me around the checkpoint.

The jangley cop securely said,
“We know your thirsty kind.”
His constipated sidekick punctuated

with an accident-flare to my sternum.
They so longed for my purple of bruises,
but I fanned my lips and yawned;

they flinched politely when
I said, “Sorry, no spare crimes on me.
I just need a nap and some Novocain.”

With me packing the blood so deep,
they told me to carry on,
but we all knew it was an escape

after dusk. From their dungeons
of reason they let me go
because they could,

and I glided away, above the dusty sidewalk,
both my shoulders brushing the invisible
corridors inside our national castle. (79)

In some ways I got over it after a probe busted 70 LAPD for large scale corruption in the Rampart Scandal. It just so happened that during that time my favorite hamburger stand happened to be at the corner of Beverly & Rampart. In those days, I was often hungry in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I've gotten over my bad attitude somewhat. In my hometown, the deputies have always been fair to me. In the huge beat that Valley Center covers, they have enough real trouble. But sometimes people send the police looking for trouble and they find it. For example, last week as I was driving home from work through Escondido, I saw some people along the road holding signs that said, "Checkpoint Ahead."

Escondido is notorious for a couple of council members riding the popularity of blaming illegal immigration for the state of all things. The council passed laws outlawing the parking of cars on lawns and setting up checkpoints for driver's licenses and insurance because it's believed undocumented immigrants don't have such things. The problem is that while such checkpoints are in operation, they cost more than your average patrol and they net fewer drunk drivers. In other words, police patrolling the entire city costs less and catches more dangerous DUIs than a checkpoint.

I turned off Lincoln onto Ivy and approached the checkpoint from the other direction. The police had set up command in front of the shopping center at Lincoln & Fig. The parking lot was full of tow trucks, generators for the floodlights and trailers.

I noticed a young Euro-American couple standing in the grass beside two car seats and a half-dozen sacks of groceries. They were watching an SUV be pulled onto a tow-truck. I asked if they'd had their car confiscated.

"No," said the man. "It was my brother's."

"They said he wasn't on his brother's insurance," the woman said.

As it turns out, the couple is unemployed and living with the brother's family. No car. No house. And now the impound fee to get their brother's SUV back. But at least they were legal citizens.

When you go looking for trouble, it isn't hard to find.

Light in All Directions at Cafe Cuzco

(August 6 & 7)--Cafe Cuzco has an in-tune piano and a huge flat-screen that plays soccer 24 hours a day. As long as I don't touch the t.v., I can play any song, say any poem, tell any joke. Just don't obscure the black and white ball on the screen that is still rolling somewhere on this planet right now. I think the Peruvians who work at Cafe Cuzco--Dario, Luis, Fernando--like it best when the ball rolls in Peru.

On the second day, I play music for brunch. Cafe Cuzco holds down the corner of the neighborhood at 57th St. and 15th Ave. NW in Seattle. Someone asks for a hymn. Good. I love to play "His Eye Is on the Sparrow." I also cover "What A Friend" by Delirious. It's odd the way the two hymns work together. 'Sparrow' doesn't ignore the danger in the world; 'Friend' is at total peace. If I were to play the second without the first, it would sound complacent, unaware of the grace. I finish up with as funky a version of "Sweet, Sweet Presence of Jesus" as I can manage on the piano.

A table asks if I know any James Taylor on my guitar. Do I know any JT? Last spring I took a ride on the yacht Nirvana, and whenever we anchored, I tried to figure out one of his nautical songs. I make it through "Frozen Man" easily, but "Captain Jim's Drunken Dream" and "Lighthouse" are new to me. At moments, I hang onto the guitar as if it were a branch at the edge of a cliff. I have to breathe and loosen my grip if and music is going to come out. It's good luck that "Lighthouse" is a favorite with one couple and I don't screw the song up too badly.

Once the hymns and covers are out of the way, I play a couple of my songs, including one from my previous book Driven into the Shade:

I've been up with the dawn,
listening to the rivers in my veins.
Lightning in my brain,
playing along to that God song.

It's something I made up one early May-gray morning trying to find a 24-hour Kinko's. "Central Park West" was playing, so I put some words to it:

Fog on the road, from the sea.
Every wave Her blue breath rolling over me.
Heartbeats break on the shore to that God song.

People ask for a CD, but all I have are books. I made a CD with "God Song" on it back in 2006 and put them in 100 copies of Driven into the Shade. I have no idea where they ended up. Time to make a new one. They're not as popular as soccer balls, but I like to think that one of them spins every now and then somewhere in the world. Although in this digital age of iPods, I'm not sure anything spins. The iElectricity gets together with the iData and makes an iHum. How clean. How immaculate. How I miss the conception.

Light in All Directions on U.S-Canada Border: "Pine Speak"

The narrator in Paul Simon’s “America” walks off to look for it. I drove a Prius. Public transportation is greener, but I’m in hurry. What’s the opposite of “green”? If you’re a tree, I suppose the opposite is brown. Red leaves like the one on the Canadian flag are transitional.

I’m in a red hurry between teaching summer school and starting classes again in two weeks. So I drove off in the Prius to look for “America.” Just outside of Grant’s Pass, I saw a shed in a field with a big sign that said, “Wake Up, America!” Will waking up America end the American Dream? Does someone who shouts, “Wake Up, America!” not participate in the American Dream? Do they have insomnia? Have they been snorting meth? Are they even tired?

No time to find out. I want to find the American Dream in as many permutations as possible, America being a land mass extending from the northern to the southern hemispheres of the world. I think I can fit the North American neighbors of Canada and Mexico into my sleep cycle before the maw of the fall semester swallows me.

I want to carry poems across borders. So tonight, I’ll perform “Men in Trees” and a few other pieces from Light in All Directions in Vancouver, B.C.

Yesterday, I was in California, sitting on Hatchet Falls with my cousin Evan. He asked me what this book is about. Literally, it’s about the sun; metaphorically, it’s about what my last book was about: sons who become fathers. We fuse. We implode. We radiate…at least that’s what the long view of the cycle looks like to me. And the cycle repeats. And it can end on any step.

One of the poems in the book I’ve been thinking about lately is “Pine Speak.” It was a poem I’d written in the voice of a pine tree. Not your usual pine tree with the wind whispering through it. This pine was imbued with my attitude, so it was guilty. The first line goes, “I stand here by the grace of my scars.” I recalled the poem for Evan as looked at the forest around Hatchet Falls where people might not see the place had been burned over unless they looked at the tallest trees in the right way.

I said the whole poem, and Evan said, “I like poems like ‘The Wake of Sam McGee.’ You know, they have that rhythm.”

I took it as a good omen. The next day I would take Lights in All Directions north to Canada while the Northern Lights were going to be visible in the south because of an explosion on the sun. The Americas were moving closer together at turns by nature and by human obsession.

Here’s an early draft of the "Pine Speak." The part about “My wood can burn or rot for all I care” seems in retrospect to be a variation on the fuse—implode—radiate cycle.

Playing a Request: Lost Dog

John Guzlowski asked me to post a sample poem. I tried to post one but couldn't get the breaks to work in html. So here's a link to my poem "Lost Dog" from Light in All Directions (27).

Light in All Directions: Wins SDBA

My second full-length book of poems received a San Diego Book Award, so in honor of Light in All Directions, I'm beginning this blog. With the words "all directions" in the title, I have a lot of leeway.

Light in All Directions is my second book of poems from Poetic Matrix Press in Madera, California. Back in 2001, Poetic Matrix had a chapbook contest to which I submitted a manuscript titled "Liquid Monolith," my twist on 2001: A Space Odyssey. The contest was focused on the new millennium. Since I think trauma has an incredible shelf-life, my poems were about how we wouldn't escape the past in the future. Not the festive tome Poetic Matrix Press was looking for.

Still Poetic Matrix gave my chapbook an honorable mention (It would later be published by Oak Grove Press as "River Murmurs"). About a year later, an editor of Poetic Matrix Press called to say that he wanted to publish a book with "duende." Did I have a full manuscript like "Liquid Monolith" and, if so, did I have a better title?

"What's a duende?" I asked.

"It's an earthiness that transcends into the metaphysical, giving rise to a dark music," John Peterson of Poetic Matrix told me. "And there's also a touch the demonic to it."

"Then I'm your man," I said and then sent in Driven into the Shade. Poetic Matrix published the book in 2003 and 100 copies of it included a CD of musical performances of the vocalese poems in the book. Where those CDs went, I don't remember.


Now I'm back with a new book and at least three people beside my mother like it. Any questions? Yes, the man with the beard in the back.

What concord can light have with darkness? What's the relationship between Light in All Directions and Driven into the Shade?

Good question. Very Biblical. The concord of light and darkness is shadow. Aesthetically, shadows represent the ineffable that poetry implies. Driven into the Shade was perhaps a bit more reactive than Light in All Directions. For example, in the poem "Fireworks," the persona is a bit passive in his relationship to fire, whereas in "Fire Mind" from the second book shows someone who's more reactive. I'd like to think the second book is the kind of book someone with a little more experience would write. Yes, the woman with the scowl in the front row.

At key points this book gets political. Don't you think poetry should avoid politics?

Two things, first, if I were dealing with theoretical politics, you're correct. I should just write op-ed columns. But I tried to write about moments when policy intersected with someone's life. Perhaps I pushed the metonomy or allegory at points, but I tried to keep physical contact with the world we live in. Second, politics can't be avoided. To quote the late, great Lucille Clifton, "The decision to go out your front door is political." Yes, last question to the man in the third row wearing the double-breasted pin-striped suit that I wish I had.

The voice in Light in All Directions is inconsistent. In some poems there's a strong narrative and in other poems you leave the reader floating in a dark void and bumping up against random words. Where's the light in that?

Well, the truth is, sometimes there appears to be no light. I know some of the poems in the middle section are difficult, but by the time readers make their way to the "Radiate" section of the book, their poetical eyes will have adjusted to dark so they can see.

Now, I want to thank you all for coming. You're invited to join me for a special reading of Light in All Directions at Winston's Beach Club in Ocean Beach, California, on July 12, 2010. The reading will be hosted by Chris Vannoy of the Drunk Poets' Society. The reading begins at 6 p.m. and there is no cover. Winston's is at 1921 Bacon Street.