And I guess I want to move to this other poem.
It's part of a new manuscript I've been working on
for a number of years since Emplumada called Bird Avenue,
or Bird Ave. I'll be telling you more about that title later on.
But I did take about five years off of poetry.
And part of the reason was a trauma
that happened in my family.
My mother was murdered.
She was murdered in a very traumatic way
while I was away at a poetry reading in Minneapolis.
And it's like, one night, or one day,
the farm corn-fed kids with straight teeth
would be telling me, well, what is
it like to live in the barrio?
Aren't you afraid?
Well, and then coming home and finding out
that next morning my mother had been murdered
in the barrio in one of those random acts of violence
that you face every day.
Coming from a lower economic class,
that's the first thing you do when you get money, right?
You go and move to a safer neighborhood.
But anyway, because this happened
when I was off on a reading tour,
and because of poems like that first one, for example,
it affected me.
And I stopped writing poetry for a number of years.
And this was one of the first poems I wrote after that.
And I promise the mood's going to change.
So let me just warn you.
I figured maybe I'll just get rid of my bleak stuff
right away.
This is one of the bleakest poems
I think I've ever written.
And also of wanted to read it, because it came out
of a Greyhound bus trip.
I'm getting ready to go back from Flagstaff up to Denver.
But I wrote this on the Greyhound bus
passing the Atascadero State Hospital,
which is where he was at--
Edward Long this is another Edward Long poem.
Atascadero State Hospital in California
used to be called the Atascadero State Hospital
for the Criminally Insane.
And other than very, very poor people
such as Edward Long, also in there
are your hardcore repeat sexual offenders.
That's still what it's known as.
Your hardcore sexual offenders in California
gets sent to Atascadero State Hospital.
So this poem is a combination of things.
It's called "From the Bus to E.L. Edward Long at Atascadero
State Hospital."
So it's to him.
It's written to him.
And at the same time, it was on the occasion
of the death of a very close friend of mine
from a heroin overdose.
This was a guy, a vato loco from the Barrio
who was a poet, a Chicano poet, who was just
an incredible, intelligent poet, and had stayed off
of heroin for 20 years.
He was much older.
Had stayed off of heroin for 20 years,
and then went back and died of an overdose.
So all of these things were working on my mind.
And this is the poem.
"From the Bus to E.L. At Atascadero State Hospital."
Fall, peppercorns, rouge into salmon roe.
The finished hills blonde in Califas
get crew cuts as cattle, which the hip grass into flat tops.
5:00 o'clock shadows singe and vanquish
without felling the scrub oaks and manzanita snarls.
Dusted summer squash lays on the gone
lawns, ready pumpkins in the fields, brightest
plastic and faceless.
Their time up evident is flaring matches in the hole.
There's a town coming on.
It shows in the Greyhound windows,
the mooned mounds instantly green, fence and civilized.
They sat you here, where you stuck
like a poison dart between the idler bar and the mud hole mini
mart.
Small wonder, vato.
You envisioned your Jupiterscapes
here in these Martian landings.
What messages they blew to this world, the seeds of something
generative.
Some day, you said, they would blow us both away.
There was a code to be read in the nothing of an empty page.
There was a plan to the shambles of sage on the rocks
or the bumbling kooks on the blocked streets,
the nothing of a stranger who refuses to give.
The nothing of a television mouthing nothing
to a nothing house full of nothing
like on the morning they'd locked you up for good.
You were here, Ed.
And there's nothing here.
Moonscapes, desert wastes.
As it is in this light, the eyes read but register nothing.
Cables and telephone trees, white fences,
the immovable air vanishing on the nude hips
of comatose women.
Is this what you saw?
Nothing?
In the hedges, the chopped ends, the panicking roads
where nothing is distanced between ourselves
and an abundance of nowhere.
The institutions of our lives embed themselves
in the shallows like the clumped rowhouses
of Camp Roberts, the wooden graves of the suicidal dead,
or the wars where they laid you to rest resisting.
And you, you could have gone on to King
City or the temple of angels.
Instead you were here, where the wounded blackbirds warble jazz
to a crazed wind, where the dusk was this pure and uninimical
as law, devious as treaties.
A substance fills the night, the absence of light
with whatever we imagine.
Think of it.
Space trips, vato loco of the stars.
This is what you get in this life--
the lockdown of nothing.