WEBVTT

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And I guess I want to
move to this other poem.

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It's part of a new manuscript
I've been working on

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for a number of years since
Emplumada called Bird Avenue,

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or Bird Ave. I'll be telling you
more about that title later on.

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But I did take about
five years off of poetry.

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And part of the
reason was a trauma

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that happened in my family.

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My mother was murdered.

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She was murdered in
a very traumatic way

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while I was away at a poetry
reading in Minneapolis.

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And it's like, one
night, or one day,

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the farm corn-fed kids
with straight teeth

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would be telling
me, well, what is

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it like to live in the barrio?

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Aren't you afraid?

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Well, and then coming
home and finding out

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that next morning my
mother had been murdered

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in the barrio in one of
those random acts of violence

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that you face every day.

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Coming from a lower
economic class,

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that's the first thing you
do when you get money, right?

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You go and move to a
safer neighborhood.

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But anyway, because
this happened

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when I was off on
a reading tour,

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and because of poems like
that first one, for example,

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it affected me.

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And I stopped writing poetry
for a number of years.

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And this was one of the first
poems I wrote after that.

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And I promise the
mood's going to change.

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So let me just warn you.

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I figured maybe I'll just
get rid of my bleak stuff

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right away.

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This is one of
the bleakest poems

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I think I've ever written.

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And also of wanted to read
it, because it came out

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of a Greyhound bus trip.

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I'm getting ready to go back
from Flagstaff up to Denver.

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But I wrote this on
the Greyhound bus

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passing the Atascadero
State Hospital,

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which is where he was at--

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Edward Long this is
another Edward Long poem.

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Atascadero State
Hospital in California

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used to be called the
Atascadero State Hospital

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for the Criminally Insane.

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And other than very,
very poor people

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such as Edward
Long, also in there

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are your hardcore
repeat sexual offenders.

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That's still what it's known as.

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Your hardcore sexual
offenders in California

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gets sent to Atascadero
State Hospital.

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So this poem is a
combination of things.

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It's called "From the Bus to
E.L. Edward Long at Atascadero

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State Hospital."

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So it's to him.

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It's written to him.

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And at the same time,
it was on the occasion

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of the death of a very
close friend of mine

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from a heroin overdose.

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This was a guy, a vato
loco from the Barrio

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who was a poet, a Chicano
poet, who was just

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an incredible, intelligent
poet, and had stayed off

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of heroin for 20 years.

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He was much older.

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Had stayed off of
heroin for 20 years,

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and then went back and
died of an overdose.

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So all of these things
were working on my mind.

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And this is the poem.

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"From the Bus to E.L. At
Atascadero State Hospital."

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Fall, peppercorns,
rouge into salmon roe.

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The finished hills
blonde in Califas

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get crew cuts as cattle, which
the hip grass into flat tops.

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5:00 o'clock shadows
singe and vanquish

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without felling the scrub
oaks and manzanita snarls.

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Dusted summer squash
lays on the gone

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lawns, ready pumpkins
in the fields, brightest

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plastic and faceless.

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Their time up evident is
flaring matches in the hole.

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There's a town coming on.

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It shows in the
Greyhound windows,

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the mooned mounds instantly
green, fence and civilized.

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They sat you here,
where you stuck

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like a poison dart between the
idler bar and the mud hole mini

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mart.

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Small wonder, vato.

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You envisioned
your Jupiterscapes

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here in these Martian landings.

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What messages they blew to this
world, the seeds of something

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generative.

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Some day, you said, they
would blow us both away.

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There was a code to be read in
the nothing of an empty page.

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There was a plan to the
shambles of sage on the rocks

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or the bumbling kooks
on the blocked streets,

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the nothing of a stranger
who refuses to give.

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The nothing of a
television mouthing nothing

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to a nothing house
full of nothing

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like on the morning they'd
locked you up for good.

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You were here, Ed.

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And there's nothing here.

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Moonscapes, desert wastes.

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As it is in this light, the
eyes read but register nothing.

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Cables and telephone
trees, white fences,

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the immovable air
vanishing on the nude hips

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of comatose women.

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Is this what you saw?

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Nothing?

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In the hedges, the chopped
ends, the panicking roads

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where nothing is distanced
between ourselves

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and an abundance of nowhere.

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The institutions of our
lives embed themselves

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in the shallows like
the clumped rowhouses

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of Camp Roberts, the wooden
graves of the suicidal dead,

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or the wars where they
laid you to rest resisting.

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And you, you could
have gone on to King

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City or the temple of angels.

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Instead you were here, where the
wounded blackbirds warble jazz

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to a crazed wind, where the dusk
was this pure and uninimical

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as law, devious as treaties.

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A substance fills the
night, the absence of light

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with whatever we imagine.

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Think of it.

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Space trips, vato
loco of the stars.

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This is what you
get in this life--

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the lockdown of nothing.

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