And it means a lot to me as many because my own relationship
to jails and all that but also my son who
did 15 years in prison.
And my son Ramiro who I wrote the book [INAUDIBLE]
and you mentioned him.
The thing about him just so people
know he's doing really well now.
He's been out of prison for 10 years.
He did all those years.
But he-- took him a long time.
It's very hard to [INAUDIBLE] knows them very well.
It's been hard for him to be in the world.
The reentry issue, the reintegration
is very difficult, but he's been working at it
and now he does danza.
He does Mexika danza, and he also writes poetry.
He himself is a poet.
And he's also helping mentor people.
We started a program at Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural
called From Trauma to Transformation,
working with the formerly incarcerated people
and institutions, and now he's been helping with that,
working with one guy who did 28 years in prison
and another guy who did 10 years.
And there's other people that we were working with.
So my son is doing really good.
I want to mention that just because his name came up.
I want to end with this poem to Los Angeles because it is--
again, Los Angeles to me--
I've lived in the Bay Area, I've lived
in Chicago 15 years and the Inland Empire,
which people don't know.
Diana knows.
Inland Empire's where LA County, San Bernardino County,
and Riverside County meet, that area that meets there,
and I lived there for a couple of years.
But LA's really my home.
Even though I left it for a long time,
I consider it where I am from, and it's
my imagination really grows and develops
and where I feel there's only belonging.
It's LA, and LA's a really hard place
to belong to as anybody knows LA.
But I do.
And so this is my poem to LA and one of my poems
that I wrote when I was poet laureate of the city.
I was very honored to do that 2014 and 2016.
And it goes like this.
This is Los Angeles where Santa Ana winds scatter
dry leaves and droughts make tinder out of the formerly
green brush, where wildfires are metaphor and reality
for our internal and external terrains,
where the city is music but also muscles,
a rain dance often with no rain.
Neon glared, smog-tint skyline held together
in a spiderweb of freeways.
It's a place where even jacarandas and palm
trees are transplants.
This is where the city's buildings are bricked
and nailed together with survival stories, war stories,
and love stories, the kind of harrowing accounts
Los Angeles unfurls at 3:00 AM when ghosts meander along
the upturned pavement or rumble by on vintage cars
and all night diners convert into summits
for the played out, heartsick, and suicidal.
There's a migrant soul in this rooted city, Skid Row
next to the diamond district, waves
of foam against barnacled piers, cafes, and boutiques
next to botanical.
Ravines and gullies turn into barrios,
rustic homes with gardens dot bleak cityscapes,
and suburbs burst with world class graffiti.
Fragmented yet cohesive, Los Angeles
demands reflection on ourselves and the unstable ground
we call home where people die for a lack of a roof or food
or compassion.
As renowned LA writer John Fante would say,
"These persons are songs over sidewalks,
imaginations under inner change, humanity that deserves
connection, touch, breath.
These roads, bridges, and alleys also contain concertos.
Breezes over the ocean's darkest depths
are replete with harmonies, and a howling moon and red sunset
serve as backdrops for every aching interlude.
Los Angeles is where every step rhymes,
where languages flit off tongues like bows across strings.
Skateboarders and aerosol spray cans
clatter in a daily percussion and even angels intone,
We can do better.
We can do better while haggling at garage sales.
Thank you.
[FAINT APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much, Luis, and I really
appreciated you giving context to all of the other things
that you've been doing aside from your most recent book, Tia
Chucha's Cultural Center, the books that can be found online.
You also have a bookstore, and you're also
doing a lot of transformative work
not only about prison reform but also just about trauma,
trauma that is in underrepresented communities
everywhere.
So I just--
I honor the work that you do.
We've been friends for a long time.
And it's just you're such an inspiration,
and then you have such good friends here, too,
who are amazing poets.
So I'm so glad that you were able to invite them.