 So this is a pretty new poem I wrote called The Prophet Song. Capitalism is the ism of capital. Capitalism is Darwinism. Capitalism doesn't want you to think about that, though. Capitalism wants you to think of it as your individuality, as expressed through your available currency. Capitalism only recognizes two seasons, beach body season and sugar consumption season. Beach body season begins two days after Easter. Sugar consumption begins immediately after Labor Day. Capitalism wants to steal your lover away from you. Or at least capitalism wants you to think it wants to steal your lover away from you. Capitalism wants you to take action against it. Do it! Do it! You'll need to start by investing in a plan. Do it! Capitalism needs you to believe it cares. Capitalism needs you to care too. Capitalism needs you to fully demonstrate how much you care. Do it! It's important to capitalism that you care. It's important to capitalism to know what you care about, even communism. Capitalism wants you to think communism is its exact opposite when it's really the same thing, at least if you're not in the winners class. So go ahead and care about communism. Do it! Do it! Do it! There's nothing capitalism can't sell you, except for gun control. Because you know the weapons in ammo market is fucking gold these days, people. And who would ever want to fuck with that golden goose, you know? It's just like oil. Someone is always willing to pay too much for it. And man, has that ever been working out solid for capitalism? Capitalism wants to know why you're looking at it funny. Why are you looking at capitalism funny? Stop looking at capitalism funny! Do it! This is serious. Don't you know how much goddamn money is at stake? Don't you understand? We are capital. And capitalism is the ism of all capital. Tom Clark used to give me a bunch of guff about writing easy poems. I always feel guilty, I feel like that's one of the easy poems. But those are fun. Those are what people relate to. That's what resonates with listeners and readers. So here's something that'll probably resonate a little less. This is you post-mod Prometheus U. Hello. A faux fur blanket slipped around unwoke shoulders like a wolf might with her cub or cautious prey. Together we walk bosom in pie and bosom unsure of whose was which. I cannot hate you, Los Angeles. You never pretended you weren't shallow. You never lied about being a liar or a welcher. And in this way, you are nothing like San Francisco, a bucket list of coronary surprises dangling from my fingertips. An evolved creature shambles forth while the rest wander and remain targets in the malls of the Darwinists. There is no train, plane, or bus, or car that cannot be colonized. Greetings, civilization. We are here to subvert your DNA. And don't listen to anyone else who says different because they are here for the exact same reason. Unreasonably asking you to unravel for a grubby little band of architects and agitants constructors of deconstruction. Listen, a life lived in the ruins holds a great value now. To be able to function in the past bodes well for the future. There are worse fates than being an emperor of petroglyphs, but it makes a return to the temperate coast difficult, perhaps even impossible in less than a lifetime. Once intermission is over, reckoning begins with the means of disposal and some never get past this. Who doesn't want to live forever in the valley of the moon where the chicken parm is always over salted? No more humping in the executive washroom at the annual staff dinner formal. When has passion ever been fixed on static? Wanting to be so much more than the alfalfa deserts, manifest, or forever hold your peace? Everything ever has been seen and archived by the trees, even the ones masquerading as your walls and ceiling. It's okay to crawl once in a while, we're supposed to. It's why hands and knees happen together. In this way, the world draws its map onto us, and the world knows this. What it will do is no different, dear snowflake, a unique brokenness awaits, melting into all the others, and someday you will reconstitute and become the postmodern Prometheus. Seeing through a new set of eyes each day, all of this connectedness scurrying back into Plato's cave, yearning for that sweet Western comfort, trying not to let the bastards drag us down, but what if we're the bastards? Let's leave the Christmas lights up and on all year long because that's not what is killing the biosphere. Never doubt that you are the envy of the spirit world. Their only motivation for breaking open this snow globe empire is because they couldn't keep their hands off of it. That's how much they want in. They don't care that it's not real. All they know is that it is not the void. They are trying to get at the light, and you shine a light that only others can see, not just in another world, closer than you know, closer than anyone thinks to look, but it is possible for eyes to be too open, to let in too much light. I hope you wear shades to let me know you still have those eyes. I'm gonna do another easy poem because it's fun. I like fun poems. This poem is called Dork. The dorks, my people, my tribe, the tribe of dork. Who else obsesseses over the nth degree of minutia better than the tribe of dork? I remember one of the brujas writing a poem after a show at the stork club called Dorks at the Stork. I was Cassandra. But I digest. The list of appetizers and entries is long. The relevance of rhyme, the Oxford comma, one space or two after a sentence, the proper usage of a semicolon, the proper usage of a colon, dashes for punctuation, ellipses for punctuation, the overuse of slashes, the overuse of line breaks. But you actually like those. The relevance of the Chicago manual style to style, the relevance of footnotes to relevance, the relevance of David Foster Wallace's footnotes to anything, all this, a small sample size from the smorgasbord slash buffet slash all you can eat of the entrees of campaign issues belonging to the tribe of dork. Man, is it any wonder, AWP has become a writhing rat king's nest of repressed sublime sexual tension that can be split wide open with an overheated biodegradable spork which not coincidentally rhymes with dork. See, tribe of in footnotes. One more fun one, and then I'm gonna get serious again. This is for my dear friend, Allison Moncrief, who is a mixed medium artist in Oakland. Who I'd met a couple of years ago and just blew me away. Just blew me away at a poetry reading and it was the first time she'd ever read poetry. She's like, I don't do poetry. I do installations and so, and she just, it's just not fair that people who are so talented start doing something else and they're so good at it immediately. So she put out two books in the last year and this is called The Gender Neutral Pimp. And all of these are, all of these are her titles of her most recent book run together into a single poem. They're in the fetal position, please let them see you. Love eludes them, they are out of my league. I want to drink like them. It doesn't matter what makes them tick. They are a mouthpiece for my internalized misogyny. Their mother was multiple choice. They checked the window. Just think of them as Moses, as Batman. They are a young young grab bag. Them is an end times metaphor. They would never call someone a talentless bum. They will also grow old. Dear they, why must the beast turn into a prince at the end? Jane Eyre serves them burgers at the in and out. When they close their eyes, do they see God or Coca-Cola? And by they and them, I mean you and me as if we didn't already know that. I'm dedicating this poem tonight to the past. We lost a really, really good person, a really good member of the poetry community that last night, John Oliver Simon. He passed, John passed last night. Yeah. Yeah, he was wonderful. He was wonderful. He fed our conscience, our consciences. He was a pillar of all that was good and right in the poetry community to the best of my knowledge. I wasn't super close to him, but he came to my readings and I featured him and we worked together. And right, I got to honor him with the Berkeley Poetry Festival when they gave him the Lifetime Achievement Award and it was a very special time. So this is for him. Sanctuary. Reaching through the Saran Raposphere congestion in prayers for streamers of cold, crisp air cooled by moonlight. Though I am not a creature of the night but a denizen of the pre-dawn. Having come here to escape not from everyone else but simply everywhere else. A hiding place to be alone in sometimes because my social currency will certainly wash out with the next high tide. Hanuman lives in all of our memories, fucks with our heads every time we take on the animal rituals of body, the reptilian rituals of death and sex, the angelic rituals of cleansing and the demonic ritual of burning the whole motherfucker down. Man, I have grown fat on social media. Memes are far more atricious than the fake news cycle, however. There remains an impossible magic loving to be found in the smell of these ruins. It refuses to die. A new city is built from the twilight residues scattered by winds from a fall. No investor saw coming round the mountain when it came. Hope was left behind somewhere on that journey but like the river, like love, it is a relentless comer that reminds you that you are too quavering in voice. We become intoxicated on a forbidden tincture. Holding all the secrets of guilt, grief and joy so vividly felt in the collapse of television networks, the bloody conquest of righteous barbarians and an unfortunate smear of dog shit loaf running up the sides of your brand spanking new loafers. Man, we can't hide in the laundromats anymore or the donut shops doubling as burger joints. Can't take cover in the union hall no more or the miniature golf course. Walk easily into Canada because there is no longer an unguarded border for our new thing, our overword-driven thugocracy. When that heavy, particularly twilight coils, its purple boa around our shoulders, that is the time we will need most to know that there is a place for us, not just a place, not just a shelter, but sanctuary. The place where monsters cannot reach us, at least for tonight. We have a concrete slab in the boiling night to lay together on a cooling absorbency as the foundation of a new kind of starry prayer. Feel not so much here, our comrades calling out to us from afar that the collective sabbatical is over. Drain the bath, wear your layer of grime against your nakedness, a shield of bacterial armor. You can't tell me you're not ready for this fight anymore. You can't tell me you haven't prepared the eviction notices for your old demons. You can't go on wrestling with questions, trying to distract you with the whole thing about there being no wrong answer, but there is definitely a right one. Mama, we know you're doing everything. You can't drag the family back down to the soil. The cost of just enough sanity to keep the unsmooth machine belching away, but you couldn't know we would take to it with such vigor, like that one fish all those years ago who decided she had had enough of the fucking ocean for a lifetime. Dear American, you didn't have to be so ugly. If you die an hour from now, your life has still been 90% better than the rest of the planet's lives, but fetishizing that other 10% is what makes you such a beautiful American. I can look unions and I can look you in the eye and say, yes, you have that fire, but I need you to put your hand inside me as well, war and glove and tell me the same. Tell me I belong in this Rube-Goldberg contraption of spiral orbits around spiral orbits, around other spiral orbits around us, straight up obit. When one of us moves through the veil, the veil also moves through all of us and worries the mob as they cray out. Without hyperbole, we are nothing to a calling response that fires back with the tone police are the only police we need. Very well then. As below, so above, but then don't act all surprised at the lack of fear of love in this kind of world. Once upon a time, I may have come back with, I told you so, but what does that gain anyone besides an accurate aftertaste in the tonsils? Is that all you can afford? Pretty smug for a white thug. The secular world sustains an industry of self-congratulatory award programs for those who refuse to get on their knees, for those whom the words compromise and codependency trigger anxiety attacks, for those who refuse to humble themselves beneath the firmament because that's what it means to get on one's knees. So please, just sort of kind of hold me close and please gently stroke my forehead while hot tears drift into your palm as we wait for the southbound trains. Maybe I can catch my breath before catching my death of being a so-called aggrieved adult requiring the soothing comfort of my children who never, ever asked to be drafted into the emotional healing industry. Thank you. It's for you, John. How much, how am I doing on time? Okay. Although, are there photos? Are there photos? I know, I wanna be, I wanna be courteous. I'm gonna go. I just never get to hear you read for a while. That's true. Okay, we're gonna go to, this is my most recent book. It's been a while. I'm still getting used to this. We Shoot Typewriters is from Nomadic Press 20,015. I'm actually pretty happy with this book. And I'm gonna be able to do one fun poem and one important poem from this piece as soon as I find just the right one. Oh, it's in here somewhere. Oh, yes. Lines of Solitude. My galaxy for a planet fully populated with nothing but orpheus eye. My planet for a city of sitting poets. My city for a single lover in my orbit. Light does not apologize for its awkward presence in dark matters, and why should it? Everyone knows it's nobody's fault. The invisible weight of these arrangements. The infinite death bout between appetite and vanity. We lust, we transact, we are disgusted, and we didn't even have sex. What could possibly be more German? Oh, what's, thank you. Oh, what spectacles can we build for public consumption now? Just some strange physical hustle of intermingled mashed-up identity that didn't quite take. Sure, we are sad, but secretly more comfortable alone. We mean what we say, but we don't say what we mean. I guess that wasn't that fun. I guess some people's idea of fun is not the same as others. Thank you, thank you. See that? The poet Laureate said it was good. Oh, I'm gonna go into another poem here. Conversation with Michael. Thank God there's stability on Twitter, because there certainly isn't anywhere else in the noble universe at this point in the fourth dimension. DC is the new Hollywood, and it's loaded with the ugliest people on the planet. I wanna believe that three to six inches of rain in 36 hours could make it all go away. All those nice easy factors of three and six circling around in endless variations of an inversion. There'll be no fliering for the revolution that whether we've gotta maintain what's left of our immune systems. I mean, we've really gotta maintain what's left of our immune system these days before we can be in a position to brainwash the petty bourgeoisie into seeing things from our point of view. There's nothing stable about ideal conditions. There should be an exchange program for disillusioned idealists. Fundamental evangelists need to spend 36 hours in San Francisco during the Folsom Street Fair. And the anarcho-socialists of Northern California will need to spend the next 36 hours at a Jolo's Steen Revival, and then spend the third 36 hours with each other sharing what they've learned. We're in a nexus where a northern front are going to feed into each other, causing heavy precipitation, but moving fast, a brief, furious enema that is going to make everything worse in Santa Rosa with flash floods and a lack of infrastructure, and no one has the excuse of saying they didn't see it coming, but we're gonna say it anyway. Because we don't know what else to say when the world decides it's not our year again. Doesn't it decide that every year? Try to remember a year that was a good year. How far back do we go until we find a good year? I suspect that might not be what's important here, though. Just loving all the new stuff. Candles, do you know why candles are perfect? Because when you squint at them just the right way, they look like the number one. That one is made up of three components. Wax, wick, and flame. Without these three components, a candle cannot function, therefore a candle cannot be. The wax molecules in the candle look around to see only their fellow wax molecules, and declare there's some total to be wax. We look like wax, we act like wax, thus we are wax. But in fact, they're a candle, and someday they're gonna figure this out. They'll hear the panicked rumors of an impending flame, and when the flame gets close, the molecules will do things they had never dreamed of before. Their foundations will become so much less solid, and so much more fluid. Their interactions and engagements occur at speeds faster than thought possible, and as always, they will seek their own level, and become one with a flame, aetheric, a candle cycle complete. And if you think this poem is about candles, then you're still just part of the wax. This is the dialogue I really wanna have. Back when I was young and strung out, as opposed to old and wrapped tight, I could talk to birds. I'd wander out into my backyard at some godless but all too human hour, and I could hear the rhythms, the patterns, the melodies, the call in response, the jazz in the songs of the desert finches, who ruled Las Vegas in its semi-darkened AM ecstasies. I was seduced by the cadence, the complexity, to the point of seeking out my own wet, acid-drenched whistle, my own raptor voice, and so would attempt to replicate the exact song of the finch, who sat just feet above my head in the nearest jumble of dry branches. Sh, sh, sh, sh, sh, sh, sh, sh, sh, sh, sh. What I realized as I did this was that she always patiently waited for me to finish my attempted trills, before she would then spin out a chirping, tweeting retort that ran circles around my dusted imagination, that left my tongue dizzy, my brain nauseous, my eyes twirling, but we were in dialogue, human and bird raptor spawn alike. I could do shit like that in those days. I suppose I'm wiser now. I often wonder how much that is worth though. One more. The accidental imperialist. I'm on to you shadow man, creeping through the archetypal funhouse portals of the subconscious. Yes, one time too many, a little too fast. Yeah, and I know who you work for. Yeah, your boss. She ain't just a son of a bitch, a real bitch of a bitch, and takes her absurdity queer, a queer up, no tracer and no less than one dozen dialectical levels simultaneously. So you best watch out next time creeper man, moth man, I'm coming to run straight for you with my arms wider than the mansion you found me in, than the desert wash I found you in, arms wide open to embrace, you will be faced with the prospect of being stuck for eternity with a needy clingy poet who will never let you go. And how does that make you feel shapeshifter? Where will you go and what will you do? Pull up a chair, I hope, and sit down next to me with a spot of some perhaps powerful tea, and maybe we can work this all out if you could please, please, please, just tell me all the stories about the things you've seen on the other side of the galaxy so that over time my words then become your words, allowing me to fashion them into any vehicle I fancy and turn, allowing the see through barrel I hold over my head appear much easier to write into the wormhole galleria, perpendicular to a snaking puffy cloud of sativa, writhing its way down in a cross Franklin street, all the way to Brooklyn Basin, but no, we skipped something the past few years. Don't match up as well as I think they are, and we're missing something, some bright misguided hope that seemed without end when our gritty ass Brigadoon was still off the map and under radar expedition ravings, where love seemed possible up on that dim lit stage, but it all got recocked somewhere down the way, like everyone was always in love with the wrong person, just having a hard enough time getting to the hookup until we finally got a convention of those beasts together and Quan and Maisha met and fell, and they are still falling and still going strong. And the truth is if the rest of this world falls to shit, but these two lovers are still together, it will all have been worth every damn bit of it because that is the kind of love that gives me more hope than I have a right to believe in. And if you'd only take a moment to look through these dazzled beastly eyes of mine, through the eyes of a conquered shadow man, then you would also love. Thank you so, so much. San Francisco, the main, Kim, thank you. Thank you all for coming out tonight. My own. The funny thing about those glasses is that I went to a reading with a different pair of glasses, and it was in dark space. And when I came home and reached into my purse, these were the glasses that came out, not the ones I'd arrived with, but they are exactly the same prescription. Poetry creates mysteries. So we are across the Civic Center plaza, basically, from the nearest Ohlone village site. Another funny thing about being the poet laureate is that people ask you things like, why are there so many great writers in San Francisco? That is when they're not claiming they're bringing poetry to San Francisco. But let's take the first, because that's a more sensible question. In a world where, you know, I mean, we could name, we've got Cobreth, we've got Twain, we've got a lot of really substantial writers, historically and at present, Mary Tall Mountain. And I get asked this question, I've been asked this question before, but it's been three, four times a week since they named me Laureate. And I think I know the answer. And it's the same reason that Sourdough bread does really well here. It's an effective place, a perfect storm. We have beautiful natural sounds and gorgeous fogs, and we've got these hills. And then for a really long time, and this is something that if you're new to the city, you might not know, for a really long time, post-conquest, I grant you. So that wasn't great. But once San Francisco became kind of the city we knew, culturally, not racially, mind you, but culturally, the mix was pretty balanced. And what I mean by that is that there were not more of one particular language cultural group than any other. And what that meant was that even as uncomfortable as it got, and as much as we knew each other enough to have complaints about one another, it was balanced enough to where nobody was ever really in charge. And that's a good thing. My grandfather came here. My dad is Native American, so we'll just leave that one where it is. My grandfather came here and was a union man when the city knew how to do unions, OK? And he used to talk about going to union meetings and hearing at least 10 languages without trying. And there is a huge strength in that. When I talk about this in terms of poetry, I talk about voices. There are a lot of different kinds of voices of poetry in this town, and that is important. And it is important for the same reason that it is important not to plant fields with a single thing in it, because we need all the different ways to decode, to solve, to resolve, to emote, to make sense of. That's really important. I was at an incredible poetry reading. And I should remember when it was because I just had to redo my resume, but you know what? I don't. It's probably about, what, one year and a half ago, Lordus? The first time we read together? Year and a half ago? Something, two years? Something year and a half, two years. Sharon Coleman put together the most unexpected but spectacular thing that fed me really well at Frank Betts Center. And I got to hear this next poet for the first time. And her work shook me. Now, it is not easy to shake me anymore. I have been doing this poet weaves for quite some time. I've been doing this poet weaves so long that when you talk about John Oliver Simon, I have known John Oliver Simon long enough to have complaints. We've been never close, but we've been in the same pond for a very long time. And I say that I've known him long enough to have complaints so that I can also say this. There are very few people you can know, as well as I knew John Oliver Simon, and still feel like their intentions were always the right ones. And for me, his death is actually interesting because he taught my daughter, who has been dead for five years. So it was another one of those things that felt like a clipped string attaching me to that. And it just went to the point that I said something that was borderline rude on the posting that I saw where it told me that he had passed, which was, yes, I've known him for a long time. He taught my daughter. And somebody pulled me up on it. And I'm like, no, you don't understand. That was a big thing to say. I trusted that man. And I don't trust a whole lot of people. But back to the next poet. Her work was such a different voice for me that I went home and wrote. How many poets are in the audience? What kind of compliment is I went home and wrote? So now that I've completely raised everybody's expectations, honestly, one of my favorite people in the world, Lordess Figueroa, please come on up and read some poems. Here in Ohlone Territory in San Francisco with all these great poets here, you're awesome. Good evening. I wasn't expecting that. Gracias, Kim. Thank you. Salam, Apu. Thank you. So I'm just going to dive in. That's what I usually do, so I'm just going to dive in. To begin to mumble, let air flicker between the tongue and spit. I wonder how the lips begin to move before the throat slides down then up. How the heart pumps, uncontracting out. Let the lungs wheeze in out spongy holes, fill smokeless wind bubbles, windpipe sliced in half. Nawa girl, born on the fence of iron and rust. Nawa girl, born on the center of the vagus. There is coal in your mouth as we wander across the forest. They have told us that there is gold and silver in the heart of the tree. But we dig underneath the tunnel of the volcano to find a juggler vein with a mouth. There it spits out fields of the sugar cane. Nawa girl, brew the agave. The galleon sits amiss. She calls it occidental. There are oceans between us as we learn to swallow bourbon. There were hundreds of chicotazos on her back. Nawa girl, your skin is changing. It glistens under the five moons, under the five suns. We have arrived. The cotton fields have made them golden. We are ancient in our song, Nawa girl. Migrant three, I swear to you that they did come, that they are here. I saw them. At least I felt them. The rain collapsed hard that day and so did the horizon. But they stopped by. Their bodies were everywhere. I heard their babies crying. They were wrapped in blanket bundles with wide brown eyes. I swear this to be true. I can feel them. It is as if my world went into theirs. No, no. That's wrong. They went into mine, into ours. They smelled orchard and gondust. A dry berth, dice la Maria, un nacimiento, pero secos es la Maria. It's the hardest. A blood berth in the bag, empty bag, pero mirar o los pies. But why do we land with our head first, our heads, our feet last? Skin wet and red. Is it because we notice them now? But they have always been there. The feet dancing, dust, dirt, sucking the folds in of the callus, like the belly, skin of the kachayote crowning. The bag barely had water, but enough to thicken the growth, a swell of Spanish breath. Mimicking the sound of English as la migra officers pile into the tomato fields. In the back are a ma in the closet that looks like a wall. Maria flew across the border to fill up with something overstayed and couldn't cross the back. Tongues and feet crossing over, smacking back and forth. But a wet berth is easier, dice la Maria. As the water rushes through, the head is easier to push out. The feet slide out last as they should. Migrant too. We began to catch glimpses of them in the horizon, pink in their glow, sun in their walk, bags full of grain. We were warned that they were coming. They would arrive, request to only have a sip of our water. As we saw them from afar, we began to feel their bodies rising around us. The children reached for their faces, only to touch the sound of their ribs. And we looked and looked at the horizon, the line of the earth and sky, the stars full. Emiglan, the voices are sweet like the ripples of the lake. Color plum are his lips. I put salt and lemon on plums. Where are you from? I like to always say I'm from the tomato fields, but I'm from California. I hate California. Hush, I stupidly love it there. Texas is my home. I haven't come out here in over 18 years. There's whiskey on his lips. He slurs, leans over. My brother has leukemia. Oh, I'm sorry. But there was a time where I tattooed three tears just there above the cheek and the curve of the bone. See right there? Can you see where? Really close to the eye. It's really tender there. It is our most ancient and truest form. I tattooed myself in red and black ink. I wasn't angry. I haven't spoken to my brother in 18 years. Maria says, no sé qué hacer con él, ya no sé qué hacer. Estoy cansada y sus hijos, ya no le dicen nada. Se salen o regresan toda la noche. She says, le gusta ir a donde le pica la cola. A marriage is a marriage, she says. We have three boys together. Three boys. But poems wither and die. What does that say about our essence, our being? I don't know, but if you look far enough into that distance, you will find yourself in a crowd surrounding a beach dwell. Because of the low tide, there's a sound that she makes. She makes a sound against the wet of the sand. Her lips are purple and torn. She starts wondering if we are just poems of God. When we frame, we look to see them. We want to see them disappear as they turn past the bushes. Migrant one. The sea began to surround us. The further out we went, we discovered the horizon pink in her nature. The mouth of salt breathing, a white glow. We started to uncover faint bodies. Our tongues tasting with the rivers entered the sea. With the sea weed flowering us. We entered into the glow, rubbing each other's eyes with the tip of our thumbs, dusting away life. Only to hear the sound of heart. A womb-like movement. And this is going to be my last poem. In this poem, I wrote it for a friend. Theo, he passed away a few years ago. We were really close. He read a lot of my poems. And we were going to make plays together one day. It's called, A Memory of Theo in a City. Begin memory here. My memory shifts every time I remember home. Te hecho de menos. Me fui a buscar nuestro sueño. It had rhythms of cumbia, the city of ours. All I wanted was a raw land, un cuerpo marimacha. Theo came to San Francisco to be an artist. I came to fall in love. Theo spoke Tagalog, loved my Spanish. He was brown, soft-spoken. Migration, he said, is what birds do to survive. We uprooted ourselves for love. I keep tripping over borders. I keep remaking his face. He wanted to go back. He was a painter. All animals move. I don't think we ever had roots. Here in this city, the lights were long. The streets curvy. He loved to remind us of the campesino and the outskirts, how the Filipino migrant farm workers tilled soil alongside the Mexican migrant farm worker, tending to the orchards and the tomato fields. It was dirt. What do you do when things fall apart? I came from the fields, landlocked. Theo came from the islands. We were raw imagining a world longer than ours, where the buildings stood like stone while we moved. The cumbia in our hearts, the sweet dance of Banda in our ears. No, the light was different here than there. Here the light mimicked us, making our faces as clear as daylight. Theo passed away, leaving us this city. La agua se hace negra. Aguardientes nos calma. I keep dislocating my tongue. It feels lonely. I am lonely. Theo died alone, refusing to bear weight on us. I imagine that he must have wanted to be buried here, where we dream. The truth is, we're all lonely. Eres hermosa. He died in the hospital, waiting room, waiting. And you said, how far have we run to make each other? There is no cityscape older than this one, where the ocean meets the earth, where he refused to go back because to uproot a tree, it takes several bodies. There is always a piece of root left. And I stood over his body like elephants do when they grieve one of their own. Here the water is sweet like the ripples of the lake. I could never afford to build my own house here. It is dusty with bones, mouthscaping. Sometimes it smells of Manila or Mexico City. We were glorious. Here we are nothing. Theo was a dishwasher, Theo was a cook. Theo was an artist like you and I. The city is everything. Holy land of milk, of honey, Mecca. Babylon or was it Suram on the outskirts of Deltiwakan? In the sun pyramid, brown bodies, black bodies, dyke bodies, fag bodies, hooker bodies. Our non bodies, you and I, roaming San Francisco with our white tongues, painters, lovers, poets, you and the city, me and the city, ciudad hambrienta, where we flower like the rose and die like the tulip. Sin papeles, how do we go back? Sin rumbo donde usar es ilegal. We are everything. Now close your eyes, our birds. There are birds migrating to make sense of these movements. Gracias buenas noches. I want you to think about for a moment what it takes to be in a moment of perfect communication. It's hard to get there. And that's sort of what poets are hunting. So we're the equation right now. The people who show up are the ones who are supposed to show up. You learn that after, it depends. It depends on how clever you are. It took me a while. You learn that after organizing for a while. The people who are supposed to show up are the people who show up. And this is the group that makes the perfect equation that has allowed those two readings. I just want you to take that in. I want you to think about what it took to bring you here, why you happened to be here tonight. That's what poetry is. I know there are some people who'd be very cranky with me if I didn't try to follow that, but I have to tell you it's a brave thing to follow Lord us up onto a microphone. I've now done it a couple of times. And I always kind of go, what on earth will I do about that last poem? So you know the answer is I've just rift a little bit so I'm making space. This is called the rough mythology. Roots run down between street lights, parking meters, sturdy bindings. What pennies will you toss into gutter water and in between the rainstorms? The places where the hybrids find you? Earned identities pinned to secondhand lapels? Street fashion. Sorry I didn't make it for the last 200 years. Come around next time if you think you can take the weight. We can't run the misery scenario every weekend. I wanna see you dance barefoot right here on this street. Learn how to walk like yourself. We might get there and under 30 takes. Maybe I'll tell you what navigating this coast taught me in 79, in 83. Roots run down between street lights and parking meters. My accidental self shows bones through the pavement and earnest rebar. Did you know you're my favorite story so far? I think the rain may kick up again. Thank you. So I was in San Francisco, I was born here by the way. My mother was also born here. My grandmother lived here longer than a lot of people live. My great-grandmother also lived here. I've been here. We've been here a while on the European side of the family. And I go through these things, the death theme. I grew up in the Mission, Noe Valley, Eureka Valley Cusp. So it depends on who you are. Technically, my current zip code is in Eureka Valley, the Castro. Technically, my parent's zip code was in Noe Valley, but I was right on that thing and my library was the Mission branch, okay? So now I've, so how many San Franciscans? Really? There you go, okay. So, used to be a San Franciscan. So when a San Franciscan, somebody raised here, asks you where you went to school. In other places, the answer is where you went to college. Here it's where you went to high school, okay? And my school career was Alvarado Douglas, which then became Harvey Milk, okay? Star King up on the top of the hill. Marshall Annex, Edison and Everett. And then my dad got a really good paying job and sent me to private school, which I loathed for four years. But I did it because dad thought it was gonna be a good idea. All of that to tell you, and I'm gonna date myself now, that I lived through the plague in the Castro, living in the Castro, okay? And it left its fingerprints. And I haven't written that book yet, but I will. Cause I used to hang out with all of those young men from Kansas who played touch football in the park, Dolores Park. And every time somebody passes it, like it shakes me in a really particular way. So this is actually for a man named Jordan, who you would have heard of if he hadn't have died when he was 23. It's called Other Birds. Points along your spine, a rub thin by mistaken ideas. Shattered birds become more whole birds and you sing each a map, a navigation song and they catch and hold or miss. Some of the birds come home. Some of the birds broken free from other birds, catch the songs in talons made for hunting maps. They catch and find their way back. They are sung back and they assemble in our apology to water around the table. Clouds are nodding stories. They try to give us rain and we can't help them. They try to rain for us. Cousins, sisters, selves around the table. We supervise the antique oven in the way that we have been taught. And in October, we will wear red dresses, bay water, bay water green, gray under the clouds. They still sing the songs. They both know they call the clouds to dance in the old rattles, the hanging red dresses from the Cyprus red dresses in October. We will sit and stir the squash soup and call our sisters to the table. The rain is coming. The stones recite. They chant in that patient way that they have. Wind snaps, snaps. She wore that dress just like that. Could dance it in just that way. The clouds are trying. The bay is singing. The rain will come. We feel the rain coming. I realize we're almost exactly the same. I'm a little older than you are, but not a whole hell of a lot, right? So. I feel like we're almost at a rainstorm tonight. There's a thing. I feel like we're getting to the point where we're going to be able to do the reading we could really do together because I feel like there's a way in which we write very similar stuff and then we totally diverge, but there's stuff that's really similar. And also the rhythm. Because I just realized I was about to say a thing I heard you say, which is, I'm going to bring the mood up a little now. There are no accidents about why people like each other's work, right? These songs and others. Shoes are usually overrated. We've sung some dust shoes, some stone shoes, some shoes that drift away in the water near the dam and leave our feet surrounded by flashing fish and the dimple shadow of water striders. And we learned to walk through the archaic of seeing a snake swim close. We could see it. We've sung some of our own skin shoes, some make-do shoes, some balance better with none shoes because shoes can be overrated. We've learned songs about our grandma's shoes, her sister's shoes, the Dilashulok toes, pounded smooth by stones, pounded smooth. And those other generation boys who made shoes of their own dancing didn't, they know how to dance. We've sung some songs about shoes that take us out of those small houses, take us where we can help more. Shoes we wear under our these days shoes. There are some shoes that cannot be taken off. These shoes that teach us language beyond language, the belonging we know, those are some good shoes too. And some days we still wear them, but we know some things we didn't then and we can easily do without. How upset would people be if I said this was my last poem? Kind of upset, not upset, is it good? Okay, good, cool. More than one, this person's saying more than one. Okay, all right, I'm gonna read this and then we'll see if you still feel that way. This is called bilingual. Skin a treaty and stake it out flat for scraping and it will barely cover the distance between disappointment in a country that made you childish promises and our beloved dead arranged end to end from the Mystic River to Archele. As the winter goes by, it will go white and stiff, an inconvenient reminder of things not finished but can be softened with random words and languages. You don't speak. Like those honor tattoos you choose from the local artists, the hype can become a drum head for bonding with people, can become shoe soles for walking a mile, walking a mile of vacation and someone else's reality and you can tell that story for years to come, years that you can keep track of on a string of knots and invented anthropology while you whisper a word you think means something about mystery or sacred but really means knick-knack. You know the funny thing about the easy poems is they're hard to write sometimes. I tend to call them rants. It pulls strings. That's what you mean by an easy poem, right? The ones you know are gonna pull a string. Yeah, that's what we're gonna do yet. Right, yeah. It's hard though because I'm always, oh man. There are words that I'm not sure what language they belong to that I grew up with because I had grandparents that spoke a couple of different languages from the vastly differing places. My mother's parents spoke Polish and there are a number of words that if you exasperate me, they will come out and I don't remember they're not in English. So I will get really frustrated and I will say a thing and be like, and the face I'm getting back is, not really sure. If we weren't being filmed, I would share some really good Polish words with you that crack me up. Find me later. They don't need to be on tape. So this is important to know. In Cialahi, the word Cialu is the name of our main goddess, the goddess of who created, the goddess whose body gave us a lot of things that we need. The word for corn is also Cialu and there is no difference. Take that in for a moment. This is called Little Songs. Little Songs change everything but if they don't change anything, I'm proud to sing small corn songs. Penny and I are watching the planets we're on either side of the water and that's a small song too. Venus and Mars rise, they're rising and I'm singing Little Songs and I keep singing them. Small corn songs and parts of corn songs that sort, that don't kill the butterflies. It's okay to live light. The planets are louder than the closet bulb. This coast is still dancing with abalone songs and we can't all sing those. I'm singing corn songs and we're all still and we're all dancing together. Thank you so much for being here. We're gonna keep doing this. This one's asking for one more. What do we think? I am persuadable, all right. Okay. So I learned an interesting thing after the levy breaks in New Orleans. I will not blame that on the storm. I'm sorry. A lot of people I respect still call that by the name of the storm. It was the levy breaks and that was not entirely the storm's fault. But I wrote a couple of poems for that and then I found out, you write a topical poem, you think you read it once, maybe twice. You read it at the big mass reading where you all get together and read the poems and then you put it away and it's over and you don't have to read that poem ever again. I have not been able to stop reading some of those poems that I wrote for that levy break for the last, since that happened in 2005. And so I finally wrote one that was kind of universally for those situations. It's called Bridged. News of you is past hand to anxious hand that amid the frenzy you have made it through with a heart that beats. That the carefully designed chaos is taking you and I don't wanna know more detail than that. News of you come slowly, the gap is bridged hand to hand and I must talk each into opening and closing ligament muscle. I have to pull the stitches tight to close the spaces made by my fear for you, for us, the cracks in the glaciered empathy, the fissures in the burned houses. I'll wait.