 So this is called Negro Geist, one daddy. Old Crow and Jack Daniels understood my father mouthfuls at a time. Jim Bean and Old Forester were uncles in hard glass suits. They'd rolled up in the knuckle crack and sigh of Hennessy taking its first breath then hound dog laughter and dominoes falling in hail on the graveyard of the dining room table. Relatives who existed only through stories and memory with ease in like zombies on ropes of blue Marlboro and Newport and camel smoke then demand a seance and spades, Coon Can and Texas hold them. No wonder they called it spirits. Spirits baited my father with cuvasier snatching him out of his body like a river catfish and he'd vanish like that. Spirits made him burn rubber scream in the driveway, stand on my bed a sloppy marionette and speak in tongue or just toss pans and skillets at midnight. I wouldn't see his ass again till the next afternoon looking like something had chewed all the sugar out of him and spit the gray pulp on the couch too, Johnny. My cousin Johnny volunteered for possession every week. Spirits lit that nigga up like Vesuvius. He was certified. Electroshock exorcisms did nothing. Empty bottles and cans were his weekend storm warning. Old English coat 45, crazy horse Cisco. They demand sacrifices in blood so bottles of howl doll and thorazine would dice roll under the couch. Friday nights then doors slam to splinters. Tables get flipped. Walls kicked until straight jackets lay waiting on the lawn. Mama would cite visions of gang boys with tire iron erections and Johnny's convertible skull with its metal vent as if it explained anything. It didn't. Between Dusk Friday and Dawn Saturday, he'd still be ready to blow this motherfucker up. You want some of this? Do you want some of this? Oh no, oh yes, oh no, oh yes. I'll be damned, I'll be damned, I'll be damned. All right. And for my mother, this is called the fire in her eyes redefines an apple written or inspired really by helping my mom do canning one summer. And while I was studying or figuring out what poetry was, I felt like I stared into her boiling pot of fruit and understood something. This is what I understood. The ritual of fruit begins again in June when buckets of smiling plums and blistered peaches arrive for her in cars, altering our kitchen into a steaming workshop. Soon blackened pots boil with our life's winter blood. She quickly buries the dead in a cemetery of sugar where apricots and pears a way to be baptized and born again as jam and jelly. Late summer brings chopped cabbages, cucumbers, and ancient spices all bathed in a sauna of hot vinegar and crushed red peppers. The walls of our kitchen come alive with the sweat of our ancestors who live again through recipes. The dead continue to feed the living with greasy fingers, stuffing our mouths with history's sweet cuisine. Mama leads us to her garden and motions over a field of greens, their vibrant tongues lapping sunlight like thirsty dogs. She tells us this is a lost art and warns that our wives will be useless to our children. Weeping, she presents the bouquet of her hands fragrant with 40 years of stewed tomatoes, summer squash, sweet corn, and candied yams. She forecasts her death and instructs us to sprinkle her body with salt until her skin appears wild with dandelions. Place her in our biggest pot and simmer to a low gravy. Seal her in a glass jar tomb. Store her in a cool, dry place and wait until the fog of poverty settles in the valley of our ignorance when there is only rainwater, credited bread, and the memory of meat. The next poem, which is the last one I'm going to read from my new book released by Nomadic Press called Black Steel Magnolias in the Hour of Chaos Theory, is this poem is called Before My Friend's Reception, I Stand Facing the Ocean. And the two oceans referenced here, I was fortunate enough to go to India. And I spent some time in the Indian Ocean, in Goa. And that week, like four days later, I basically had flown back here to San Francisco and was waiting for this wedding to take place. And I was staring at the ocean at Ocean Beach and suddenly realized, wow, this is the first time in my life I've encountered two different oceans, so close together and hot damn, waiting for this wedding to start. Here you go. It is my second ocean this week. This one's waves gnashing its teeth in a grimace between laughing and chewing. The sky burdened and exasperated by fog. I am that fog. And I attend this wedding detached as a ghost. Beneath these waves churned the surface of my first ocean, bath water warm beneath a blushing sky. There the waves were littered with people like flotsam after a storm. The ocean would eat the naked alive. Just now a dog runs the length of beach like a jet nearing takeoff, his hind legs flaring red in joy. Somewhere people spill from the mouth of a church beneath a steady hail of rice. Somewhere people laugh in the presence of roses and the foamy ejaculate of champagne. Somewhere in the space between that previous ocean and this, someone floats forgotten and drowns. Blankets have been folded and sand is spanked off flat soles while someone bobbles. Their arms like antennas on a channel, no God is surfing. Their mouths engorged with starfish, new tongues stuttering death's forbidden name. If I could, I'd swim out and save them myself, but the drowning swimmer is me. No, this is not a dream. In the flipside ocean, I stand with green water belted at my waist, afraid to be swept off my feet. I scoop up the loose nuts and bolts of seashells rolling beneath my toes when the waves are inhaled away from the beach and the water level bows. Here I stand, weeping fog and seafoam, humbling myself to learn from a dog. He snatches the steaming meat, pumping in my chest and runs for the mountains, a pile of discarded jackets before looking back longingly to ask, do you get it? Between these two oceans floats a bottle with blues lyrics telling my life. The bottle floats along the embryonic ocean like a jewel slipped loose. You know, I was once thought to have been extinct and scientists were disappointed to find me alive. I was discovered using an abacus of sand dollars counting the inventory of waves. I'm going to lie down on this cold brown sugar sand and await the dog's return lap. With my luck, I'll be found having drowned on nothing. There will be traces of two oceans in my system, my eyes dripping saline rivulets in different flavors. But first, the wedding. All right. And I'm going to sneak in poems that are not in the book that I wish were because I really am fond of these. This piece is called, Ode to a Desiccated Olive. When the Greek farmer plopped you plush and pregnant into my palm, he explained that when shut of your meat and pounded gently, your pit excretes a mild antibiotic. Instead, I carefully stirred you between rudder and wave of my churning fingers then let you exhale on the countertop like a weeping battery. Beneath your crown of leaves, a pubescent froth curls and naps with an acrid cologne of wood smoke. Left to simmer above time's distracted watch, you dimple an age into an amber compass pointing like a nipple to the tongue's north star. I caress the grandmothered cheloid of your consecrated surface so that you may come to Jesus on my altar of breath. Remind this tongue how once an engorged earlobe was combination lock opening a soprano's scale of moans. Unfold your map of flavors from vine to the secular intersection of oil and bread. Medicinal and mythical, you are a clairvoyant paragraph punctuated with blossoms of aspirin and eyelashes. If you take the place of my heart, let my veins be the roots of the tree that brought you here. This is like asking the rain in your lover's hair to fall back through the sky. And that's what you get as an artist, staring at old fruit. And if you have studied art, then I dedicate this piece to you because this poem was written and inspired by the painting by Renee Magritte, the piece called The Lovers or Duo. And if you don't know those pieces, just quickly it's an image of two lovers kissing and each has a blank cloth or towel around their faces. So my poem is called Love is Easier the Headless Way. Love is easier the headless way. What good is desire in a world where there is only a thriving darkness? Your mouth is a gate opening to any place away from here. The crumbling mansion of my nothing heart. With this form-fitting cloth, I do wed. Let us spill into one another like waves of agitated milk, placing our thoughts elsewhere onto unavailable others while our useless arms disappear into what frames us. Bench, bed, brothel of the mind. Everywhere we turn, winter remains unfinished. You don't trust your mouth and I don't trust anyone who says that they love me. What are we willing to emotionally barter for when all we have is the simple meat of ourselves? And who can say what color the world was before the Earth's canvas began flowering paint? I have this recurring dream where we live nameless as mushrooms in the shadow of primeval birds. Birds who eluded ornthologists and didn't want the press, but who agreed to soar forever without landing and seed the Earth with minerals of light. I awake usually in a choking grief, how we've agreed to love one another without ever opening our eyes. Without ever opening our eyes to the truth. All right? And I am closing then with this poem, which is one of the first and main poems I thought about reading tonight on Valentine's night because it's a poem about loneliness. And yeah, yeah, I guess you'll understand that anyway. And also it kind of echoes what the other two features were had talked about in some of their poems, especially in space and some other things. So I feel like it's appropriate. This poem is called Martian. After terraforming your night's skin into a constellation of succulents, what else is worth exploring? Tongue sensors scan new geophysical language, ultraviolet fingers in orbit spinning, rockets propelling sticky dream nipples through a necklace of star clusters. Your black gibbous moons indecisive waxing, waning, to and fro, sleep chanting canticles of milk behind a firewall of gene fabric. Chocolate meteorites of magnetite and silica, their solar nutmeg, fusion, their viscous humidity, their orbital launch and vapor trail spreading nets of munitions across radiant fields of sweet hair and bedspreads like any man at war. Your pulsar fountains sparkling applause and comments. Every asteroid impact crater blasting open, a seed head of color. I succumb to zero gravity, my pressure modules splintering, hurtling from heaven. I am touch illiterate. I search for words in my own mouth, my sweet and sour lunar crater, despite its post-apocalyptic emptiness. What word best describes an appetite for exploration of the unknown? Don't say desire. Longing is a pornographic surname in certain galaxies. So how to read a map of black holes? How to guess the temperature of your nearest astronaut? Have you touched an alien life form today? You got me about to come is how I begin all my missions. You got me curious about what's out there and what flavor it assumes. I could live on your tang extract for eight days and name each molecule uniquely. After jazz singers, insect species, Jupiter's moons, my mouth could revive you, tongue your keyboard of nerves, a soft valley of new life forms to restring your upright spinal base, psychedelic flowers to cultivate, weeping yeast for bread to bake, your eyelashes and lips bruise me from inside out. Find me sticky and fibrous, a moldy peach shattered by the kitchen floor. I am stone, I am mop, I am swarm of sugar, sugar water, a bee shopping the spires of the giant blue high-sob lactating sugar. Do you know the origin for the word testimony? Back then, words were valued that much. What makes it really strange is how its legend is easy to believe, a row of soldiers willing to exchange their balls if their words fall impotent. Please note, history's second choice in oathing after balls is Bible. Perhaps Adam's balls were filled with the word of God or honey or space dust. I only know that Adam's first prayer was, it's not you, it's me. Was God surprised by Adam as appetizer, his saintly rivulets of butter, his crunchy mass of breath, dust and carnal itch? He named each animal, but there's never been a proper name for free-range loneliness migrating head to toe. And what did Adam eat? After naming each animal, did he lick it? Check its seasoning? Who will feed us if we can't name what we want on a plate? Fuck you, my first robo-waitress yelled. I'll need tabs of Viagra and an extension cord, I stage whispered. Me, a quasar, light years from rapture, sitting in a spaceship as if awaiting to be accepted by an alien official. I had no Voyager disks to DJ or heartbeats to sample. Just this astronomers pubic canopy, it's rainforest of fresh and fruity antibiotics. Use me to keep warm like how you once used a campfire. You'll need dry, fine, tender and friction spinning and grinding to work the flame up the ladder until embers awaken and their bright red eyes and weep smoke. There's been weeping, but no one has touched me and triggered fire. No touch at all except to shove my shoulder as they shower past blind. If I remain in people's way, I should be touched again. Even if touch rhymes with choke or punch or shove, it's still touch. I see sex as a kind of conversation with various sticking points. Both my past lovers have been mutes with mouths full of mirrors or judges who gavel on over guilt and sentences. How might you describe your first love? Clumsy or clever, stupid or selfish or sad, sad, sad? The sun was first described as an erupting volcano falling from the sky, magmatic, hot to see, inflamed, brilliant, cast gold luminous and swelling upon its approach, darkness parting in star crested waves. The sun itself described the flavor of darkness how one might explain skin first tasted, skin not your own, foreign and savory. It's seasoned cells, sweating, oyster water, swallowed flames reheat the body's forgotten science and wasted fertility. Now close the cargo doors of the shuttle. My engine begins firing and the orbit burn. Such complex algebra just to land in welcoming arms. I emerge from your shadow dumb as an eclipse but at least relieved the world has remained the same. It is me made glossy with newness and unanswerable questions. My life untouched, unloved, undercover, no alive and throbbing and alone. Thank you so, so very much.