How much more?
OK, all right.
All right, what are we doing?
So when you're among poets, then you're
always discussing poetry, obviously-- good, bad poetry.
What-- how you can--
what your process is like, what you can do with it.
A bunch of the poems in this book
were originally written as postcards.
And a bunch of them I fold into the book because a postcard
is a thing that--
one, it has that surrealist juxtaposition of text and image
that are somewhat random, like Exquisite Corpse.
And also it goes from point A to point
B in some fortuitous and random flight,
and it's improvisational in a certain sense.
So there's a bunch of postcards in here,
and this is a postcard called City Terrace Postcard,
and that the City Terrace is the neighborhood in which
my mom still lives in, the neighborhood in which I grew up
in.
And it's about somebody that I was wrong about.
And so this poem is wrong, it's not correct.
And I'll tell you why in a minute.
All right, "City Terrace Postcard."
"It's 10:00 AM Rocha, in a cold wind
you stand guard, sentinel from the old days,
standing in the shadows on the front steps of City Terrace
Elementary.
But I catch your silhouette from the streetlight
on the corner of CT & Eastern, as I drive
by like I usually do, Rocha.
I see you like I always do, Jack in the Box
drink on the top step, all chubby now.
You're the same age as me.
Your face taut and thick.
Your ponytail gone gray, straggly down your back.
It's staring-- it's cold staring at Eastern Avenue traffic
in the dark, but you got a thick, black jacket
and a steely look on your face, as if to say, yeah,
they shot me, but so what?
I'm still here.
They shot you, Rocha, and so what, you're still here,
but does your mom know where you are?
She was our hostess, den mother to the cub scout troop.
When Sixto and my brother were still alive--
I doubt you remember, that later you sold my brother angel
dust when you were dealing out of that house,
and we never saw your mom again after that.
Did you tear up her last dreams and throw them in her face?
Or is this her last dream--
you standing in the shadows of 10:00 AM Sunday night,
with that look on your face, so your brother died last month
from this shit, so what?
You ever bump into my mom, tell her I'm still here."
And the reason that the poem is not right
is because like, he was not a bad guy, that guy,
but had anger.
And then so I walk around the neighborhood,
drive up to my mom's house and walk around.
And he sees me like he's lurking around the neighborhood
all the time.
I don't know what he does.
But he said, hey, I heard your brother died, sorry about that.
So yeah, he really knew more and more about me, I think,
than I knew about him, and so that poem published.
It's not really right.
There's something wrong with that poem.
There's something not correct, not true, not generous
about that poem.
Yeah, and I guess I feel like I can put these things out
in public and I should own up to them like, yeah.
All right.