Happy Birthday Truong!

The first time I met Truong he offered me a job,
which goes to show what the standards are
for TA’s at San Francisco State. Thirty seconds,
no questions asked, good luck kid. But I am
very thankful for that opportunity to fight
with unbalanced undergraduates every week,
if only to find out what teaching is all about.
It turns out to be about slowly losing your mind
in six month intervals. Over & over. Forever.
I think we did pretty good that first semester. I only
showed up drunk once, and that was the last
day of class, which barely even counts at all.

I also have to thank Truong for introducing me
to my girlfriend, Sarah. And by “introducing,” I mean
he came over & said, “Watch out for this guy,
he’s trouble. Just look at his hair!” He was wearing
a coon-skin cap at the time, so I don’t know how
seriously she could take took him, but part
of me suspects she’s still not quite over that.

But mostly I think of Truong as ringleader of a circus.
The rest of us work as acrobats & clowns, riding on
elephants and on the rest of the creative writing dept.
faculty, driving them mad with the idea we think
their classes are kind of a joke, which, compared
to the serious fun he manages to have in his, they are.

You all know the players in this big crazy tent
because you are them. An incomplete list includes:

Rick chasing homeless guys down the road,
in a clown suit, on skates, because he thought
they hit Vinh. Vinh burning incredible piles
of weed from his secret garden in Golden Gate Park,
where he picks tomatoes to make Clamato,
which Britta drinks while balancing on a beach ball
& juggling knives in the kitchen, trying not
to drop them on Olive the Super Dog, wrapped
in a pink bandanna she stole from Macy’s lingerie dept.
Ali driving her 20th Volkswagen bus to New Hampshire,
only to turn around & return, unload buckets
of east coast apple seeds & do cartwheels down Haight St.
to the tunes of her very own songs. Dustin taming tigers
in a cage made from dictionary pages, talking
shit to the pile of talking shit he found in Paradise.
Carolyn conducting an orchestral chorus, singing
the Queef poem to hundreds of kindergartners,
their parents trampling over each other to the exit.
Anvhu…Well, Anvhu is on a boat somewhere
after breaking his hand training to box Francois
& couldn’t be reached for comment. Most importantly,

Truong sits at the center of all this, mostly calm,
watching to make sure no one gets (too badly) hurt
falling from the flying trapeze. This is what he teaches
each day by example. How to be an artist, poet,
teacher, friend, mentor, guide. How to live this life
& not just talk about living it someday. How to
do all this without selling out or getting boring.
How to get serious enough to do all he’s done,
but not so serious he forgot why he started performing
his art in the first place. How to make all this happen
for himself &, luckily, for all the rest of us.

Truong is one of the first people I met in San Francisco.
And I am more at home in San Francisco because of Truong
& this circus he was brilliant and brave enough to create.

In other words, I’m Truong Tran, bitches! Let’s celebrate.

Fuck Society, Man

Society is just an abstraction
invented by English graduate students
to disrupt family events during holidays.
As in, “I’m not gonna sell
my soul to Citibank
just because SOCIETY tells me to.”
As in, “I am using
my overpriced education not just to incur
debts I can never pay, but also to pretend
this poem has something to do
with politics and not just
my weird subconscious desire
to remain 25 forever.”

This guy I knew once, when I was
in college, had a theory
that everyone went through a phase
of hating their parents. But he also used to drink
NyQuil straight from the bottle
during philosophy exams, so he might be
what we like to refer to
as an “unreliable narrator.”

Speaking of which, I have changed my name
to Connor Oberst. In fact, I am
also that postmodern author he sings about
or, rather, I sing about in that song. I do not exist.
I do however know a lot
about mythology. Certain symbols & tropes
cut universally across all known human cultures.
When I think about this, I dream
about writing the ultimate poem
& starting a new religion. This is,
of course, not
the ultimate poem. Though I do expect it will
get hipster girls to fall in love with me, now
that I’ve got a much more emo-sounding name.

Things get way less interesting
when you lay them out like that, I know,
but I’m not exactly quivering
with fear from offending the MFA mafia.
For god’s sake, one of my teachers translated
“Cosa Nostra” as “tennis elbow”
in a recent magazine no one read,
which shows you the concerns
& general ethical commitment
of tenure-track faculty across the nation.

Yet I also dream of being
one such professor. I mean,
the vacations are just ridiculous.

A Political Poem

Politics express the country’s collective
psychic disorders. Cable news simply broadcasts
the dreams of unusually powerful senators,
certainly not what the Greeks imagined
when they elected the first openly gay mayor
of Athens, before Socrates began bothering everyone
& people crept back in the closet. No one
remembers anymore. The records burned up
when the original library caught fire, in Alexandria,
at which point we lost all our knowledge
about the approaching centuries. So we make it all up,

again. Across the several dimensions, a mythic gravity
stays constant. I read this in a magazine
two days after staying up all night watching the war
not happen on commercial-free coverage on CNN.
We all were afraid to turn away, not least
the Iraqis searching the tube for clues
or omens, you might call them, falling out of the sky
& into the dawn of the future. Boom.

It is always the desert where these things occur.
The western fantasy acted out, unconsensually,
on a soundstage in the far east. Farther east
than the valley, where Gregory Peck
takes charge in a town held back by lack of water,
where settlers outside Jerusalem hack down olive trees,
plow roots into salted ground, land & destiny
stolen from somebody’s grandfather. No one remembers
his name either, though it is written on the deed
locked up in the vault of a court
that no longer exists. After the return flight home,

a line of flag-draped coffins parades down Main Street
in the Magic Kingdom, to a marching rhythm
beat out on the scalps of the Washington Redskins.
We use these myths to sell Chevrolet trucks
at halftime of Super Bowl 357. Ready, aim, fire
all the immigrant workers who make freedom,
in a very large factory, more free
than it would’ve been otherwise. I bought mine
at a garage sale, half-price. I wear it pinned to my chest,
my freedom, while I sit on the couch. I pore over

photographs of tortured prisoners, scrutinize
the anatomies of dreams deferred. They all look
the same: body parts disassembled,
dissembled from the mouths of the president’s men.
Arms & legs puked through bright shiny teeth.
Fingernails collected, put in a book like stamps,
to be used as tools in a primitive fight
against a shadow attacker at high noon.
In the dead of the night, she conjures

this pleasure again, licking your impotent skin
with fingertips. Hair on your arm a mess of tentacles
sexing the air, pressed against the edge
of whatever separates this heat from the world
it wants to eat alive, consume
the blue blue sky. His blue blue eyes,
a whip-sharp piercing bondage blue, taste
like light on the surface of water, a lake
or ocean heaving in the moon’s orgiastic pull.
Its circular orbit balanced, somewhere, by giant
bowling balls so we all stay suspended
in this disbelief in the life we’ve imagined, exactly

how a hummingbird exerts such perfect control,
spins its own gravity, a certain, sure-
footed grip on the air stood still, its wings
a globe in motion, a world
worlding itself whole.

Why You'd Want To Live Here

nixa, missouri

everyone here was born somewhere
else, in a different country,
even if that place was named
the same as this one. it is changed
now. the horizon much more crowded
than you last remember. the suburbs
huddle nearer each year. bunch
in overplanted crops that bear diminishing
yields. the future is shrinking. salt ruins
more soil out by the coasts every day.
I approach the town I grew up in
from two angles. it is never the same
twice. and never changes.
you can’t go home again, no
shit. but, remember this, neither
can you ever leave.

I Don't Actually Have a Daughter

on the occasion of my daughter’s graduation

I also only wanted
a home, like you
seem perpetually to be seeking,
running in circles, always
& never finding yourself
where you started or thought
you would ever end up. This disguises
some other desire. Your need to be right
about something. To locate a certainty,
attach yourself to it & pray, each day
for the rest of your life, to never be left
alone in the woods again. No matter
how many times I tell you bears don’t live
around here, you refuse to close your eyes
in the daytime. This is a matter of trust.
Not in me, or yourself, but in the upcoming
seconds of time, the possibility the world
might cease to exist if we stop willing it
to behave in exactly the fashion we need.
Does this sound ridiculous? I admit
nothing. There’s no telling how
long this search will continue. How you
may someday find yourself exhausted
in the face of the impossible. What then?
Then you will read this
again.

I Like John Ashbery

[title]

I often think of that imaginary time
when it was much more clear
how I should go about living in the world, or better
not think, just follow an invisible
yet unmistakable plan through the heart
of the city, a road laid in golden light
direct from the setting sun that leads
right up Broadway to the steps of the library,
its bronze-domed roof tinted red and the names
emblazoned there, Plato & all the rest, floating as shades
of purple and gray, their marble façade throwing a long shadow
getting longer, clamming the air with knowledge
cool as a tomb & just about as useful
when the pressure drops a thundering rain,
obscures even the night within a fog, here
everything once so clear
to Descartes – who saw,
really saw what he knew,
what he was – ducks into hiding
behind the surface of things, into apartment buildings
where the party continues, you know the one
we meant to attend but missed
again
last weekend when we arrived at a different
address, went the wrong way down 4th Street,
and got caught in crosstown traffic for hours,
stuck in a cab, with a jackknifed semi,
immobilized, blocking our view of the water.

Another California Poem

lost coast

clear-cut vaginal canyons split open,
slice into cliffs like legs matted with moss
wet & green & beating the waves with screams
in the mist amidst the California coast.
sword ferns poke their tips off hillsides,
fuck the air. this forest, studded
by broken totems of an uninvented faith,
no longer whole, still oozes humidity.
rain makes curlicue streaks in the mud,
fingers a pattern of letters. black sand
smeared with water spells desire.
salty, thirsty siltstone heaves
with graywacke so slow, so hard
pressed together gives
an intuition we might live
like geologic processes, or trees,
a giant redwood in a hidden grove:
open to sky, light
as kites in wind, wings bent, cut under clouds
to branches blind to everything
& nothing. all its history
written on skin speaks
the only adequate language. Braille
tongues into bark. a thousand-year record
scribed on its neck, naked, tall, exposed
to the blade, regrows itself. the roots
reach out, intertwine another
trunk like human ribs
seem sometimes fused in the morning,
sweat on the sheets, trees through the window
breathing summer heat, limbs knit, the smell of sex
sticks its wet red sap to the walls.

this is a poem

isn’t it grand

shouts into the canyon refuse return flights rimside,
batter off walls at the bottom, await a transformation
into a top-heavy metaphor for spiritual barrenness,
a change that never arrives, of course, so against its will
it remains unfull, the air within vibrato with a measured
lack of movement, not unlike an empty concert hall
that never really empties: curtains, stage, seats & cellos
left unstrung yet humming with potential symphonies
one frequency beyond the ears — this hard desert labors
to birth new prophets, Abrahamic cowboys on the trail
west, who cart stone luggage along the river, board long
canoes and point them at the gulf, not knowing the flow
no longer goes there, that their message will never reach
the coast, that only a trickle down a ditch gives evidence
a god once cut this whole in earth before it was a grave.

A poem in search of a title. For extra points, guess what it's about.

on the trail of the sun, the border
in Sonora Desert disappears, an empty intersection
late at night where traffic lights flash

red& green at once, a signal meaning
yellow, which itself is understood to say
some word with meaning everywhere

but here, the morning bears a tinseled cactus
Christmas gift of freedom -- Freedom, Arizona,
floats upon the dead sea, paling dawn

mirage, night’s last star of wonder-
ing what dreams may come upon a midnight
clear of roadblocks to magnetic north,

a quick trip over sagebrush hills into haze
where oases bend the cacti into palms:
broadleaf trees the size of hands, a paradise

so close it feels like dirt – or sand
that tries to pass as water in this garden,
flowing down the throat to choke us

Pick a title. Please.

California Dreamin’, or, The Dream of Arrival, or, Something like Life

as tough as it is to recall the details of events
ten, fifteen years later, there is burned into me
the image of your eyes beneath fast-moving lights,
on Broadway perhaps, when my fingers tingled
when I touched them to yours and felt New York
at last – or was this just in a movie starring you
know who, whatshisname, from that television show
when we were kids? meaning the idea of being
here stays one step removed from things in front of us,
cloaked in the mystery of itself like dead skin
yet unshed, this whole state camouflaged by a dream
of its own creation, self-creation, saying we are
more than what or where we have been, or can be
more, once we have obtained the necessary degrees,
personal experiences or at the very least a profile
on Sunday in the New York Times, as only this seems
sufficient to the day’s demands, might actualize,
self-actualize us in the public consciousness,
bestow a dignity or better posture others will see
fit to admire and discuss when we’re not around,
at the same time we walk down an aisle or street
to a soundtrack composed of crazy applause. but

nothing hollow about this certainty: upon arrival
further exhaustion remains, not a moment to waste
in the sun along our parade route – though gilded
trees along the way will be showered by jubilant
champagne teardrops, ahead a prize awaits us,
something real that would allow us, finally,
with all the humility we have saved for such a day,
to disavow our previous deeds, laurels we’ve earned
but wore lightly, put down with a graciousness
of even higher order, while everything, even our words,
fragile as the newsprint they love, burn quickly
in memory, the evidence of our triumph destroyed
by the arrival of what we wanted all along (it wasn’t
fame?) and the beginning of everything else to come.

this might be a bad title

somewhere over the rainbow

myth rolls up the California coast, a cold front
fogs the tinderbox hills around the city,
freezes their dreams into nightmares of lightning
& fires – whose smoke, seen from afar, appears
golden, a special effect projected off mirrors
east of the valley, still showing the way west
where it leads to what was believed to be the sun
when the state remained the only daytime star:

a destination etched on fences in Texas, final
highway exit sign embossed in gold, a secret
unmarked milepost west of San Francisco,
a floating stage made just for us to play ourselves,
a point beyond now, in the glow of a spotlight
sunset, an overripe orange under grey
inflated clouds the color of war – the weather
turns suddenly worse, beacons recede into dark,

capsize the dream beneath cumulonimbus
that wave like a flag over ocean, an ultimate
sign from the site of the wreck, where armies
of poets reassemble, sunk to the sea bottom,
breathing through each others’ mouths bubbles
filled to bursting with words of assent, a violent
yes to becoming more than strangers here,
washed up on shore, each in our own California.

I live here

California is a limp dick john on Hollywood Boulevard
California is the Central Valley high on pesticides & meth
California is Big Sur overrun by tourists jerking off their RVs in the sunset
California is Los Angeles
California is San Francisco
California is Las Vegas
California is a schizophrenic waving an assault rifle in a bank just wanting a friend
California is tomorrow
California is nostalgic for a past that never existed
California is money, baby, money
California is a furious Titan throwing lightning bolts in summertime
California is Walt Disney’s bad acid trip
California is thinking its butt is too big but will shake it anyway
California is trying to get water from a stone to grow artichokes in Death Valley
California is one exit too far down the highway
California is desperate to be liked
California is your favorite isn’t it?
California is the gardens of Babylon and the desert that’s left
California is a wife-beater and a strung-out junkie who likes teddy bears
California is gansta raps of children’s day care
California is the religion of smokestacks and gold-plated condoms
California is the curve of the earth on the horizon turning into the future
California is anorexic & angry about sunshine
California is too fat for its own good – would you like fries with that?
California is money in the bank for Central American dictators
California is the Tower of Babel in negotiations with itself
California is what?
California is Brad Pitt on billboards smiling into our vacant subconscious
California is psychotically possessed by long dead conquistadors
California is the communist dream of certain Berkeley intellectuals
California is choking on the nocturnal emissions from its own erect tailpipe
California is hills not so much like white elephants but more like dirty ones in back alleys
California is shaved head no teeth angel dust glory hole soaring
California is dead wildflowers that stink like skunks
California is a prophecy starring Christopher Walken
California is unprotected sex with strangers you just met at the Chinatown library
California is marriage for a green card but not for homosexuals
California is a pre-nup and a quickie divorce from Donald Trump
California is the undefended fortress of dreams in the eyes of Canadians, eh?
California is not what it used to be
California is only what it always was
California is maybe a little narcissistic but, c’mon, isn’t that awesome!
California is a pre-nup and a quickie divorce from Donald Trump again
California is my latest screenplay, will you read it?
California is
California is whatever you say it is
California is faulty
California is boldfaced words on a hillside and trees made of broccoli
California is the Statue of Liberty covered in sunscreen
California is doomed
California is the color of God at the end of time
California is real as it gets but how real is that
California is where America reaches the border of heaven and folds into sky
California is the golden state in flames

This is Not a Blog Post

This is a poem (or something like a poem).

jornada del muerto

i.

level land of lava.
one hundred miles long.
dead sea, black rock,
white sand, sunlight, dust.

hollow echo of silence snows
on plains where nothing lives.
windlessness blows in. clouds
rip over the Sierra Oscura. dark

mountains erode in the heat
into dust, sky. the elements
of fallout melt in the ground.
sand fuses to shiny green glass,

dust becomes something new
in the instant of shadowless clarity.
brighter than noon, false dawn
pours from a sun chained to Earth,

years later still yet to set in the dust.

ii.

All my friends are scientists discovering things making drugs creating knowledge chasing snakes doing whatever scientists do to become esteemed and distinguished indispensable contributors and members in good standing of our progressive and rational Enlightenment culture and here I am pretending to watch a historical event from a crow’s nest sixty years in the future with a group of men who are not themselves but themselves as portrayed by various Hollywood actors most of whom are dead or crazy and I have decided to call this work. We get up before dawn and it is cold in July on the desert and still black. I am in a Jeep which is a new thing at this point and next to me in the back is a tall skinny Tony Perkins looking like he has been attending a wake for the entire cast of The Sound of Music for the last six months, having uncomfortably folded his long limbs into the not-quite-functional backseat of this vehicle, and he rocks back and forth muttering what could be prayers in a very ancient language and stares straight and hard into the blankness through which we are driving. I can’t see a thing. Nobody else in the truck knows Tony Perkins is gay. George C. Scott is behind the wheel singing La Marseillaise over and over in quite mellifluous French. The radio blurts some loud static then leaves a slippery vibration in the following silence. I hum the first verse of America the Beautiful but I have trouble picturing a spot right now where anything grows. Elizabeth Taylor wears warpaint and a feather in her hair in the passenger seat. She periodically shrieks and flutters her hand over her mouth, telling us she is Pueblo and hunting Spanish Conquistadores who have been observed in the area chasing around a German fugitive on the orders of the Inquisition. She has seen them circling each other on the plains and I ask who is the Road Runner and who Wile E. Coyote but it is like I have not said anything at all. I feel we have been driving for decades maybe more. The road, really more of a rutted track, runs on in a line measured by hand with a ruler directly through the Arc de Triomphe of the mathematical imagination into the wastelandscape home of the Roman god Mars. I ask myself what I am doing here. George C. Scott glances at me in the rear view and seems to be asking the same thing. We arrive, disembark at a low windowless structure and it occurs to me there’s no need for a roof since it last rained in this place a thousand years ago. I take the dark goggles I am offered and try them on. Their tint is absolute. I don’t notice for maybe ten minutes that no one is speaking. Nothing moves. We are given warning and a countdown that feels like drowning. It looks like nothing so much as the moon, blooming from a field of cauliflower, rising out of the desert with the gravity of an old farmer confronting the winter. It looks like nothing so much as a golf ball, submerged partly in sand of a fairway bunker, awaiting in the shushed importance of a major event the player’s swing to send it arced in parabolic grace through the invisible black beyond. It looks like nothing so much as a perfect sphere of marble, mined and shaped by Michelangelo, coated by Leonardo with a stain of his own invention that reflects the sum total of all light sent bouncing around space since time began. It looks like nothing so much as a pupilless eye, born in the colors contorting through phases of rainbow, violet blue green red and crystalline white streaming out in writhing and sexual rays from which it is now and forever impossible to hide. All my friends are scientists and they stand around doodling in notebooks, drawing their coworkers naked, and they contribute these findings to journals in a language that no longer exists. It occurs to me we are present at the conception of an abstract historical era in the middle of an actual desert, and I wonder which is the more real. I am not breathing. I kneel in the sand and drag my finger through the dirt but forget how to spell the word earth while an angry general who looks exactly like Paul Newman chomps his jaws around a corncob pipe and through perfect teeth and what look like painfully distended neck tendons shouts something inaudible at the top of his lungs into the onrushing alien wind.

iii.

lightburst.
scrubbrush feverburns.
shadowtree flashfreezes
outline onto zeroground.
sandgardenblooms.
budfruit stillbirth.
lavaflow. mountaintime.
wildbluesky. horizonbowl.
land. wind. ash.
glass. steel. heat.
Trinity.