Hello avid readers.
It’s late Wednesday evening, and IT IS STILL RAINING. I might as well be in Seattle. Feh.
You will forgive, I hope, my ongoing inability to keep up with this. End of semester, the Mac died, I am stuck with a gigantic Dell on which I do not presently have admin status, and so to which I cannot presently download things like updated Flash players and other interesting plugins… Which makes doing things with movies rather challenging.
But. The semester, as I said, she is nearly over. Year one, MFA, check. Tomorrow I have my first poetry reading ever. I have read fiction, a couple of times. But poetry? Never. Even when I won a poetry award once, there was no reading of poetry. Of course, I was seven. It was Boulder. I accepted my certificate, and my $5 prize, wearing boots and a big down coat. This time I plan to be less scruffy.
I plan to post the poem, also, but I am not clear on the timing. If it appears someplace else, and they have, presumably, first rights, that probably means I shouldn’t put it up here until AFTER it is officially out. So I will post it Friday, or maybe I will make everyone wait and post it Monday for poetry day. 
Meanwhile, I will put up something else of mine tonight, to make up for no poetry this past Monday on account of the Mac disaster.
This is called “High Desert Sutra.” I wrote it for my poetry workshop (workshops are weird, but you can read better thoughts than I could come up with on the blog of one of my MFAmigas (I just made that up), at http://nervousmurvis.blogspot.com/), in the persona of a poet some of us made up, a guy by name of Leonard Hayworth, who hailed from Buffalo orginally and had a thing for the Beats.
Anyway. I can’t tell whether this is any good or not, but it sure was fun to read aloud. It is definitely not as queer as some of the other poems, especially not the one I will post AFTER it’s officially out in the world.
High Desert Sutra
I rode a carousel with allen
it led me here dropping me off the unicorn in the
city of tall rocks, not broad shoulders,
far from the urbane glistening lovemusk of
streets cars subways
in the cactus and sagebrush I look for
my own sweat tasting the wind
seeking the visions, dying, just aching and longing
stand staring into the night
on a quest to find the
lost pink nipples of civilization.
where is jack now, or billy?
the sky never darkens
pinpoints of stars in the wornout denim of the firmament
yea and I speak unto you,
you, o cactus, o kit fox, o beaded lizard, o antelope
I become coyote, the renegade trickster pimp slave of the universe.
use me up and call me done, call me yours,
a vessel, a vassal, dying to please the muse,
hoping to find myself in the baked out scrub of
red pink orange blue
the earth stinks of sage
the gods implore me to forget them, me,
unready with their message. I
balance with pan on the rocky mesas,
washout of arroyo floods like the afterbirth of mother nature
day after day after day and
pan says, shut your mouth, brother, shut your eyes,
listen to the king of spunk and madness tell you how it is, brother, and become one with
this rock here,
the one shaped like the way you loved your father,
bask in the distance from the ocean.
no million miles of water here, brother,
pan says, and he smiles
festooned with deity
all knowing
through the stench of truth.
***********************************
So that would be this one. I don’t even know how I feel about it yet. But now it is out there for you.
Pax.
Yes, it’s true: I am finally about done with the MFA (four weeks!), and that means that my limited edition thesis manuscript is going to press shortly. People have started asking how they can get their hands on a copy of The Book of Broken Hymns, which is fantastic. Right this minute I am trying to figure out how many to print for this limited edition, so you should get your name on the list sooner rather than later.
