 I need to know how many of you are not native to San Francisco, almost everybody. So that was pretty much what led to this poem called Our San Francisco from my first book. If you like the poem, you can buy the book. If you don't like the poem, there's 109 pages which aren't this poem. Our San Francisco. In San Francisco, our wide air comes fresh from the laundry, Pacific scented, and folded with a watery attitude of entitlement. Of course, as we breeze in loose fitting clothes into homes that double as swinging beach party movie sets, there's sandy magic carpets and new world art taking us somewhere silly, and anyone's teeth would glint sipping euphoria from crummy plastic or crystal glasses. Yeah, ask any American, they're jealous and also sure we're nuts. We bust in the sun too easily, swaddle billionaires in t-shirts, store madmen on the sidewalk, pray to personal trainers to use life coaches to their fullest, make love and spirit a fusion cuisine, revere the revering of old cars, court laws and dis- sorry, court law- court new laws and disparage those in force, sleep well and dream of the new surging towards us like earthquakes, several of those a week, and our established prophets of doom, always so specific, promise the big one will bust up the mother of all beach parties, whip San Francisco into something more geologic, a boiling surf. What's the diff tweet the birds that hatched in the tropics? We like the snow. Sometimes the weather lurches towards LA, seeking like you perhaps to dance with drunk celebs, then goes wind milling, kicking up the hills and into the central valley, where scurff whips westward to San Francisco, mixed with incorporate heat of burning redwood forests. Inhale, oh de sap, charcoal brute, stick out your palm like for money, white ash speckles your lifeline, your duds, your daydreams. Time to move here. You won't be unwelcome, that's our story too. The neighbors you meet will clue you in, while your absent neighbors, the descendants of gold rush robber barons and pickaxe magnates, are with the parrots of Telegraph Hill and restless social transiting. They're probably visiting our old town, New York City, where saltwater is manmade in slush clotted streets and leaks by storm sewer to the sullied harbor and crusted shores of that turned in on itself city, where acolytes of avarice smile pungistic smiles and guard their backs while digging tiger pits for friends who need to hand over the gold they took from Midas. Let them keep their suits and rat maze co-ops. Remember too, the dogged New York daughters, born to hammer craze glass ceilings, egged on by parents otherwise enfeebled by co-op boards, made to do tricks by admissions lackeys of good schools. Today's New York kids vamp success and pose as not stupefied by duties to their future selves. Probably fear most to be known as the one who failed fell westward to San Francisco, where kids binge on memes and become rich with roommates, crowd live work bunkers or old Victorian whorehouses partitioned by pimps of real estate and drywall. No privacy needed for coffee or giving birth to a business, you'll feel private in a used car. We thrum, like the Jetsons from A to B, or climb an apathetic minibus to jounce amongst all kinds, the sunny streets, social service bars, techie massage shops, tie-dye eateries, dopaterias, bad pizza parlors, endangered species tofu haunts, flowing ladies' togs boutiques, our hurly-burly souls reinvented with smartphone-lumped pockets hyper-dimpled with prescription pills and kibble, everyone poised to happen upon their grail at Goodwill. While overhead, beyond polite airplanes, satellites see the city terraforming. We do not evolve or adapt or die. We loosen up, kick back, cause accidents, luxuriate, steal, protest with frisbees, say, we were not born here, but we should have been. Thank you.