I wrote an introduction for this poem and finally deleted the whole thing. 

Sometimes, I feel if you have to introduce a poem, the poem’s not finished.  The layer of mystery beneath it, the questions the readers can’t figure out, are partly what keeps the lifeline of a poem going strong.

In poetry, I’ve become a bit bold and open and want, for some reason, to Tell Everything.

Its scary, that prospect.  But fear is a good motivator to keep pushing as an artist.

The poem here though is not metaphor, though it probably reads like it.  Its a journal, its a literal document of my activity.

In fact, here’s an oddity I couldn’t work into the poem:

I took those pennies down to Cala Foods, blocks from where I lived.  I got 12 bucks and used it all there in the store– but I still had some dough left over.  I hit up W___G_____ and then a fabric store and STILL had a few coins left. 

Walking back to my house, I took the last quarters I had and dropped them into a Homies despenser.  A homie came out and, sight unseen I popped it into my pocket.

Back home, as I unloaded everything and arranged things on my windowsill, I took out the Homie and looked at it:  It was a barber figure, fading some cat’s hair.  My jaw dropped– because that’s what my mother did for a living.

***

Altar Call

 

that next morning

            after awakening in your bed

I thought of my father

 

whom I could not imagine

holding a woman

 

with the same skilled

tenderness he’d use

handling a carburetor.

 

a migraine

            cramped you awake

 

wrapped your spine

like a fist thru a rope

and squeezed.

 

it killed our follow up morning.

no further exploring that

which fuels the heat beneath skin,

 

for you—mouthfuls

of benadryl & more sleep

 

for me, an awkward

                        apology

to each of your clean, patient

hairs

            yawning, bored.

 

I returned home

showered

smoked a joint

wondered

why

lying with you

my father

would return to me

seven years dead

as would

the adopted child

I’d been under

his thumb.

 

I took the best photo

I had of him

and burned it

 

then

            reached

for the basket of pennies

on my bookcase

that had been tangled

in a potpourri of brown

rose petals

 

separated them by breath

from the cold copper lincolns

 

packed the coins

in an old margarine tub

 

then cashed in twelve dollars

at the supermarket.

 

I used the money

to construct an altar;

 

tiny white

            candles

yellow & purple

fabric.  dice

& model cars

for my grease monkey

father

whom I’d watch work

in the back

yard from the shadows

of my room.

 

I took the youngest

photo of myself

I could find—

the one where

in first grade

I’d stopped smiling—

and carefully singed

the edges of the frame

as if to free myself.

 

I set it all with candy

pop rocks, tiny glass

hearts, an articulated

teddy bear

            with a superman button

piercing its chest

and set it on the window sill

to brew in the sun

and await answers.

At work one day, I pass the desk of this young white chick.

I was in Amoeba this past weekend, she said.  Did you know there’s an actor who has your name?

I don’t remember what answer I gave her– probably sarcastic.  But I know I thought: you’re so young.

Whether my name is my destiny or not, movies mean a lot to me.  My fondest memories from my childhood involved The Roxie, a movie theater across the street from where my mom worked.  During the 70’s and 80’s while I was there, showed three movies for $1.50.   The Roxie was where The Mack had its world premiere.  I remember it for movies like Norman, Is That You and Theater of Blood and Amazing Grace…  In some movie, I remember seeing Sonny Chiba pull the horn off a bull with his bare hands.   I remember the place for its smell, its hot dogs.  The theater had these deep red curtains in front of the screen and they’d project these intersecting colored lights on them during intermission….  The place, years since closed, has infected my subconscious, too.  I’ve had dreams of returning there.  In one, I leave a movie to go into the theater’s basement men’s room (no more details, its was a bathroom dream after all)

I miss it.  The theater was so important to me, I hope to have it reconstructed in heaven (yeah, I’m either optimistic or foolish). 

Last year, I attended a poetry workshop and again my mind fell upon The Roxie.  I searched in vain on line for more info or pictures, but there’s little to nothing.  In order to write about it, I had to rely on memory.

I was too young to date and had no close friends.  I either went with my older cousin John Edward (who liked movies but was, ahem, crazy) or as I got older– alone.  So my memories aren’t rich and detailed– there not about events and times.  More environment and feeling.  So how to write?  What to say?

The theater was popping during the Blaxsploitation heyday and the surge of martial arts films.  What keeps that theater truly alive in my imagination is its smell: that unique combination of popcorn, hotdogs and weed. 

I thought about the movies I’d seen there (Five On The Black Hand Side) and started Googling for other movie titles of that era, things I’d forgotten about or at least heard of and never seen.  I decided to try and work in as many movie titles I could since specific memories of that place have faded.  I wished I was smoking herb back then (my mom would have killed me then filled my grave with napalm and holy water).  I wished I had the courage to ask Denise or Maria or Javonne or Marvina or, fuck, Somebody to’ve gone with me and let me ‘try something’ in the dark.  If nothing else, this may have been a juicier poem.  As is, its what I’d call a puzzle poem–I’ve worked in a good 34 movie titles here– a couple i’m sure will whiz right past you.  Many I’ve never seen, a couple I hadn’t heard of.  One (Goodbye Uncle Tom) will get an essay here on this blog someday. 

The title was the hardest part.  Its partly my creation of the word: foodgasm, which is what you get when you’re eating something so ridiculously tasty.  And me mis-hearing the name of a restaurant here in the city.

***

Cinemaorgasmica

heaven is a downtown movie theater

                        on two dollars a day

 

its vertical neon marquee

            a cinephile pest strip

drawing movie house phantoms

to die elegant deaths

            under colored klieg lights

 

in the moist body cologne of the auditorium

steamed hot dogs

                        buttered popcorn

hang in the fog banks of

weed drifting down from the balcony

                                    like laughs

                                    like moans

                                    like audio commentary

 

black momma/white momma put five

                        on the black hand side for us

 

sent us: Ashy and Afro-sheen’d

to an uptown saturday night green pastured

house of cinema repute

that serves nite train on tap

& screens master of the flying guillotine

            with norman, is that you

 

in the bedroom dimness within

it’s cornbread, earl & me

with abby, & carrie, claudine & coffy

            testing our senses for the first time

in the dark

 

discerning the subtleties

on the tongue

            between cherry & strawberry

& learning how true angel food

is a buttered nipple of popcorn

softening to submission         between

your lips

 

with each rubber soled step

back from the lobby

the floor tears loud as a crypt

                        door pried open

 

on the last house on the left

on the house of the seven corpses

on the house that dripped blood

 

pouring libation of milk

duds and raisinettes

we call the names

 

trick baby—truck turner

there’s hell up in harlem

get cristie love across 11oth street to her candy

tangerine mandingo  According to the legend

of dolemite, buck and the preacher are downtown strutters

            on the monkey hustle

working alma’s rainbow for the human tornado

& we digging up celluloid bones for

cleopatra jones and the casino of gold

 

enter the dragon & farewell uncle tom

 

            we outta here like greased lightning

            we outta here like shaft in africa

            we outta here like bingo long

            we outta here like end credits

 

But next weekend, let’s do it again

***

We bonded his second week at the job,
him being one of the company’s few black
male employees, and the youngest.
“I don’t want to be here,”
he said. “It’s my birthday.”
It was less a month before my own.
“Just turned dub one,” He frowned.
I treated him to a cheeseburger for lunch.
Thereafter, we behaved like relatives;
foolish, silly boys. He had a complex
about his modest build
and would challenge me in the hallway to

make himself feel better.

We were caught once,
punching and shoving one another
by a young file clerk in braids stepping

off the elevator.  Seeing us struggle
she announced, Momma like, ‘yawl stupid.’
and pushed on to the fax room.

I should have known better, being 15 years older.

But I never had a brother.
& I admired him.  He was not a virgin.
He was not shy and withdrawn

like me.  He was loud. Friendly. Charmingly obnoxious.

We spent lunches looking at females,
him criticizing me for missing all the Good Ass,
then pushing me to holla
after getting clear I wasn’t gay.
He’d post up against a building
as if being photographed for Vibe,
send me after butter colored sisters
in short pants or cute white girls
with ass, then afterwards: “What
you say to make her laugh?”
Or, “I should have gone after
that one.” We speed-window-shopped
Gaps, Republics, Navy’s, Lockers,
saw colored shirts stacked like candy
and huge rock walls of shoes. Monday
morning he asked about my weekend
with the Mexican girl and, over a bacon
and egg burrito swirling in his mouth
like shirts in a laundry,
barked: “Did you fuck?! Did you fuck?!’
Not wanting to hear anything else but
Hell Yeah.

He told me he stopped smoking weed
because it made him paranoid–
yet he was still afflicted. The day
he had laryngititis he surfed the net
for images of enlarged, infected tonsils
and was devestated to read the connection
between AIDS and cancer via the thyroid.
He stood and opened his mouth, demanding
I diagnose him, checking from a fag-free distance

 the soft cavern of his throat for tumors.

One day, he pulled me aside:
I need to talk to you in private.
We went to a secluded patio
behind our building. He wanted me

to sit with him while he awaited
courage to call for his HIV results.  
Turning his cell phone over and over in his hands
like a stone he’d like to throw, he
said

he was scared and asked

wouldn’t I be too.   Wanna to find

the perfect one, he said.
But she wasn’t it.
He told me about her,
about their session.
Showed how her nails peeled tiny flaps of skin

off his hand as if for lotto tickets,

told me about how he rode her,  holding

her arms behind like 
wheel barrow handles, telling her to whisper
since his mother sat in the next room–
him accidentally calling her That Word
while on his hind legs
and the Look she gave him.

                                            Then,
the condom snapped like an overworked sail.
Fruit juice went everywhere, he said.

A great silence enveloped us 
as the nurse put him on hold.
He stared at his phone and frowned.
What to tell him? What to say?
This is as close as I have ever been
to having a real brother to brother moment.

But, Lord-
I have seen how his world
is so much larger than mine
and I am ashamed to be so ill-prepared
to tell him anything except
you’re going to be fine,
little brother, if you just wait.

This was my first full weekend in my new apartment.  I find myself looking around as if this were a dream and I could just wake up–

* in a ditch

* in my last apartment

* in the house where i grew up

This is also the first apartment I’ve had where I stayed alone.

College was a bust for me.  At 21, I came back home shamed that the university lost my financial aid application– and whom could I approach for help?  Upon my return home, the house was crippled by the Loma Prieta earthquake.  The next month my father became ill with a cancer that would kill him two or so years later.  I found a job and after my father died, my mother became ill.  As an only child I decided to take care of her… and her father, who moved in with us after my dad died.

That cost 7 years.  They both died, I lost the house, then moved to Sacramento for a couple of years.  Turns out I was adopted, so I lived with my biological family for 3 years, before my new mother put me out and I returned to the East Bay to look for a job.

My first apartment I shared with a female poet.  I went to a workshop she was trying to organize.  The workshop never went beyond that first session, but she offered me her other room and I stayed for just over a year…  She was in college and I left there when she graduated and decided to move into her girlfriend’s house.

My second apartment– well, I hadn’t much rental history and had little experience hustling…  But I was anxiously looking for some place that would take me.

This happened to be on my birthday, which is 9/11.

Searching for an apartment on the day when everybody is glued to the tv is hard.  That night, I played pool with friends, but it was like distracting yourself at a wake.  Both my friends had a mutual friend in San Francisco.  They connected me with her, and I was able to move in and live for four years.  She had rent control, so my end of the rent on that noisy room over a busy street: $456.

Time go long, and she finally met someone who ‘Fit’.  Her lifestyle, her heart, her body, her mind.  She moved out leaving me stuck. 

I went to the beach, did a ceremony for a god I’d heard good things about, and the next week moved into a victorian in west oakland with friends I’d known for many years.  they just moved in themselves and offered me a room, my own bathroom, a shared kitchen.  I stayed there close to four years before the mortgage crisis and another roommate downstairs who screwed them out of a couple grand in back rent forced them to leave.  They allowed me to stay rent free for a couple of months while they fought the bank and I used that money to get the place where I’m at now, and where after all this time I actually have peace and am no longer a ghost in someone’s back closet.

And my move this time was also on my birthday.  That night I lay on my floor steaming in sweat and heat– felt excited and proud and like I’d been given the ultimate birthday gift from the universe: a new life.  An opportunity to restart everything over.

I am now 40.  With no family.  No parents– no siblings.  The parents who raised me, dead.  The mother who birthed me– we’re nothing to one another.  The siblings I have on paper– disappointingly meaningless.  Its odd, feeling an island to myself.  There’s no photos on my walls.  No family albums, as when my foster mother died, the family came in and swept the house’s memories out like a tide.  Leaving me with memories which are so old, they’re like a movie I’d watched long ago I remember only the briefest scenes from.  With no one to bounce any memories off of, they don’t feel genuine.  Did my father really say that, did my mother really do that?  Or am I dreaming?  Odd.

I feel myself 20 years behind everyone else.  All those years of illness and age and responsibility and lost opportunity and ignorance…  soured water under a rusted bridge.   I should have been here, in this room, as a young man instead of a man beginning to gray.  But here we begin again.  And standing in the mirror, my hair freshly cut down, I looked at myself again for the first time, and thought: where do we go from here?

just to give a shout out to this piece of awesomeness.  Didn’t know there was a video for it, but I’ve been rocking this on my iPod for weeks!

I’ve ever heard belongs to this man.  In context; he was telling a story about meeting the actor James Dean for the first time.  As he walked over to make introductions, he thought to himself:

“Let me dig this solid cat and see what jumps in that wig of his that’s causing all the flip on the vine.”

Come on!  That’s just gorgeous.

Buckley is a hero of mine because of his use of language and storytelling.  There are books…  recordings and videos that are required listening.  But I excitedly bring it up because he’s finally getting his due with a forthcoming documentary.

I started packing the Uhaul van at 4:30 Friday morning.  Figured it was too early for the neighborhood crackheads to jack me while i made laps back and forth from the van.  Figured too I could work in the
cool of the pre dawn morning and not sweat out like a maniac.

Phuck That!

I sweated through the shirt I was wearing, changed, then sweated through the second one.  by sunrise when I took my phone out of my pocket (wait for it!) discovered I shorted it out, rendering the keypad useless.

I realized this while sitting at my computer, sending out a last email to my friend who promised to help me move.  After pressing SEND i checked my phone, discovered it crippled, and grew so angry I nearly broke the table the computer sat on it half. 

I would have to do this alone.  And I was already exhausted.  And it was my 40th birthday. 

I watched in horror as call after call came in and no button I could push on the phone would answer it.

I couldn’t even press 1 to retrieve any voicemail.

It’s Friday–6am.  I’ve got a stuffed van, no friends.  No family.  And a very long weekend.

At 7 I left the house and went out to breakfast.  While walking to the train station, I prayed.  Just as the final word in my prayer left my lips, a truck pulls up next to me. 

Not quite the miracle I was expecting.  One of the brothers in my neighborhood I met years ago while doing poetry. 

Where you going.

Just to Bart.

I’ll give you a ride.  Get in.

Eric had just gotten off work doing graveyard as a nurse at a hospital.  I was going to ask, but he was already fading behind the wheel.  I was greatful just to get a ride those handful of blocks to the station.

Breakfast in Berkeley.  Fruit pancakes–stuffed with blueberries, strawberries and bananas.  A shrimp omelet.

I returned home, packed the last of my shit and did some final laps through the house.  I took a bag of refuse to the backyard.  Instead of tossing the bag off the porch, I walked it down, and saw beneath the porch a spiderwebbed, yellow striped handtruck dolly. 

I thought about that verse in the Bible:

Genesis 22:13 And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold behind (him) a ram caught in a thicket by his horns; and Abraham went and took the ram and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son.

I loaded the dolly on the van and drove out to the new spot.  The streets were steep and narrow.  I took one route and nearly got caught behind a garbage truck, then a car double parked with a Nigga accessory hanging from the passenger side window.

I’m not a skilled driver.  i waited.  They let me pass.

The dolly made unloading easier.  In the parking lot, my phone rang in my hand.  I looked helplessly at the caller id, clumsily pressed some keys, then turned the phone face down and started unloading.

Hours later.  Its over.  I drive the van back to the rental spot, first stopping at the gas station.  I’m exhausted and dehydrated.  I grab a Ga**r*d* and pay for some gas.  The dude behind the glass looks at me.

Internet.  He says.  You have internet.

Um.  Yeah. 

Here.  I have something for you.  The truth about the war!

And he punches the receipt printer making a long strip of paper and writes out 11 sites and things for me to Google. 

While standing there, waiting to fill my tank.  I’m watching him write and list out: T90 Tank.  Camel Spiders.  Israel vs. Hisballah.  More. 

I wondered ‘why’– then took it as ‘Why Not’ and accepted the strip of notes as a odd birthday present.  My birthday is 9-11. 

***

It was fruitless going to the phone store asking if they’d just give me a replacement.   Asking if she, the, ahem, customer dis-service person could even do something to make the phone work or wake up.  I shoved the phone back in my bag in shame and went back to my new, um, home.

***

I don’t have to tell you how nice it is to now have a bathtub instead of a prison shower.  To make dinner for myself in my new apartment.  To no longer feel homeless, and to finally have a home.  No roommates.  All this is mine.  Wow.

***

All of this is to say, my phone is still dead.  After moving I can’t afford to get another one.  If you want me, you’ll just have to write.  I’m here.  I’m at home.  Holla

is free from the burden of pregnant teens and soccer moms chosen for jury duty …vice presidency.

Ooops. I should have said SPOILER first.

My Alaska story is about the fishing industry and how one winter i decided to heed the call of the voices and do the Jack London thang and take a job working on a fishing vessel in Alaska.

I was doing it for the money. I was gonna get rich quick. I was 23. Shee-iitt. Couldn’t tell me nothing! Especially moms:

But you can’t even swim!

Shrug.

You don’t even like fishing!

But the money!

oh, but there was no money.

I didn’t get a job on a crab boat– THANKFULLY–but a herring, salmon run.

…Caught a plane from Oakland to Seattle, from Seattle to Anchorage, then a small boat plane to an airport like a bus station outside Cordova. Outside there are huge, breathing mountain ranges draped in snow surrounding a long runway with small planes drifting down like cranes. See 45 men standing in front of the airport waiting for vans to swoop around, pick us up and drive us out to the ship.

It was then, standing there in the cold, waiting for the vans and looking at these other dudes that I seriously began having second thoughts.

I was in the last van to the ship (natch!). The van driver was this heavy set white dude who chain smoked. The ashtray boiled over ; a cemetery of brown & white tombstones. He’d finish a cigaret, crush it, simultaneously dig for another. In the movie, he’d be played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

We load up the last of the bags and the last of the dudes in the van, I jump in shotgun. While I’m strapping my seatbelt, the driver turns and says to us: “You guys are fucked.”

And we were

16 hr shifts. Mine: midnight to 4pm. $5.13 an hour then 7something for overtime. Seven days a week. A four month schedule.

I quit after two months. One dude went the whole four and came home with either $4500 or $5500.

So, that pain provided me some poems. While there, I had no camera, I just journaled. And a year or so later when I began going around to open mic readings, I returned to those notebooks in order to cull poems from it.

The piece below describes my work shift– though the religious imagery I used metaphorically, pushes the poem away from narrative & telling and more into showing & poetry.

For the religious imagery, you must credit or blame my grandfather, Rev. Robert Triplett–bless his soul, rest his spirit. But I do think prayer kept all of us safe out there in the middle of nowhere.

* * *

Cathedral
Keeping monks hours, I rise again
at midnight to a false dawn
where the sun pauses at the horizon
to creep sideways like a crab.

Our crew chief materializes at the door
salmon roe dripping from his palms large
as prayer beads. Midair, he draws
the sign of the dollar. Then,
I am Lazarus summonded. Baptised
in fish blood, a rain slicker my shroud
and am clusmy as any thing newly risen
from the dead.

Men in ripped rain gear lay out stretched
along the hallway floor in obscene shivering parodies
of their former mainland selves

We pray over the burning incense
of a marlboro and return to the sanctuary
of our ice steeple. We pray standing
beneath a malevolent god—a huge metal tank
furiousing hiccuping fish and drooling arctic water.

It stands, at the altar, a cross.
like good apostles, we bow our heads
having already taken vows of debt, poverty
and believing our lives prior to this
was a vision had between shifts.

We use herring for our communion.
They represent our sins and spewed
before us every 15 seconds are a new
assortment of reasons to repent.

Here’s a fish for every time I cursed my father
Here’s one for every time I wished someone
dead or reached into my pants whispering a girls name.

Here’s one for jealousy for laziness for blasphemy
for idolatry for rudeness for selfishess for vanity
for stealing for cruelty for lying for boasting for
anger for envy for greed for sex
for chrissakes make it stop!

MAKE IT STOP!!!

After eight hours, I spend breakfast
on deck surrounded by the quarrantining ocean
so barren and desolate it is
even islands cannot grow here.

suddenly, there appears on the surface of the water
a severed stalk of kelp. I blink twice
before convincing myself it is not a dead woman
floating, forgotten
her hair spread out in a black web.
it’s just… uprooted seaweed
that has only known sunlight in its prayers

anyway, this apparition frightens me
because this is the first time
I’ve ever seen a dead body
and was
envious

Some poems are, to me, paintings in jazz.  Collages of ideas.  Lines, stanzas jammed with visual activity and the sounds of vowels and consonants crashing together in waves.

I enjoy creating them– they don’t happen often– but I’m never sure what if anything the audience gets from them or what its like to hear them. 

Coming To My Senses began with me thinking about Stepin Fetchit and wanting to cast him in a poem.  I don’t know what I wanted him to do or say.  But I wanted to use him somehow (the brother could use some work…despite, you know, being dead an all).  The initial poem had a few false starts.  I kept letting him run laps in my imagination, hoping something would take, but nothing did.  Finally, I tried putting him in the chair across from James Lipton on Inside the Actor’s Studio to see if he’d talk to me from the page.  That didn’t totally work either, but I liked the idea of him talking about his craft.

This is my brain on free association:

So I let my crazy child out of the basement of my imagination and asked, ‘What kind of movie would Stepin Fetchit make if he were still alive.’

‘He’d make a big screen version of Good Times like James Cameron did the Titanic, The crazy child said.

Hmmm, i said.

There was one other element I drew on, and that was a book I had from a now dead poet whom I knew and greatly admired.  I saw David Lerner in various poetry readings I attended here in San Francisco.  He was a huge man who made a huge impact on me.  (Mental Note: Post essay on David in future.)  I was thinking about him and his work since I’d gotten my paws on one of his books, and I began thinking– how would he approach writing about Stepin Fetchit?  If, that is, David was black and cared about such things.

Borrowing david’s voice was what made the words flow.    I wrote freely– as if the words and meaning didn’t matter–and meditated on the voice of this huge, smoking, junky white dude delicately reading his extraordinary poems.  My brain cleared a lot of residue.  How one of my poet friends told me his favorite word was tarmac.   Racial Jim Crow Imagery.  Walking downtown SF and seeing a garbage can full of stargazer orchids.  The phrase I came up with the previous year: blacktose intolerance.   And how some smells can be loud as a noise and the joke I wrote years ago: she’s prolly got so many STD’s that when you stand next to her it sounds like bacon frying…  

When it was over and the dust cleared, the poem that materialized turned out to be much deeper and more personal than i expected.  I didn’t expect my father to show up– or for the poem to be about him.  There was a story of him and my mom arguing once and him stepping out of the backroom window to escape her.  After all that, the closest I think I got to what David conceivably could have written was the line about Jesus.  A line I was proud of catching and could hear him saying it in one of his pieces.  (he didn’t.  its all me)

The theme– about waking up, realizing things, seeing things for what they really are– is something i’ve been going through personally for a couple of years.  But more on that later…

And after all that, your argument that the first stanza with Stepin isn’t necessary, I feel you.  But fuck you.  I totally see your point, its an unnecessary conceit to get us into the poem, but It stays because I adore it.  So there.

 

***

Coming To My Senses