Anyway, so I published a new book.
That was my first book and it tells
the story of my early life, as a lot of first books do.
And it's a little grim, and it's uncompromising,
and it really doesn't have a sense of humor.
And so I wanted to write a book where more of my personality
was coming across.
And so I'm proud of what I've been able to do in this book.
I think it's a little more how I am as a person.
So to get us started, are we feeling good?
Yes.
Yeah, OK, cool.
All right.
Good, good.
So I'm going to read the first poem in this book,
and it's got no punctuation.
It catches up.
So my books are--
I'm such a narrative writer, but I'm
too much of a coward to write novels.
So I write poems that are narrative
and like the books have an arc.
The character starts one place and ends up in another place.
I don't really mean that.
I think poetry is the best genre--
I do.
And so this poem picks up with the speaker--
kind of where the first book leaves him.
Are we all fans of Stevie Nicks?
OK, do we all know who Stevie Nicks is?
Yeah, OK, cool.
I talk about her in this poem.
Day Moon-- after I left, I waited for someone, a friend,
or her herself, to walk quickly up to me on the bus
or in the bustling coffee shop and slap my face, spit
on my hands, call me a bastard, a real motherfucker,
but I waited, I mean, I wanted to be
revealed by some visible sign.
A welt to ride the ledge of my cheek
through the glass littered streets--
It didn't come.
And it didn't come and I grew desperate.
I stared too long at strangers at Safeway.
I bought boxes of clementines and ate them
like a possum on the train, cramming the rinds
in the gap between the seat and the wall.
I drank warm beer.
I made no calls.
I sat on a hot metal bench by a briny lake
and tried to imagine the lives of the joggers passing
in front of me-- their joys, their sicknesses, and regrets.
I was useless.
I thought of my friend who wrote a novel over a long winter
in Nova Scotia.
Read it once and buried it in the copse
of birches behind the house.
He chose the spot he said for its plainness.
So he couldn't remember later and dig it up.
And in this way, one medicated season slid into the next
without incident.
Gardenia bloom.
Persistent sun.
I fell in love with the perfect voice of a Midwest radio
DJ from a station I streamed on my phone--
called in one request after another.
I fell in love with a video of Stevie Nicks singing
backstage to her makeup artist.
Sheer cotton dress-- their harmonies
breezy and immaculate.
I woke around noon to the thump thump of helicopters,
and another unsober voicemail from my dad angling for a loan.
Went out in my underwear and found a fine black powder
settling on the window sills, dusting the parked cars.
A day moon suspended in orange haze.
It turned out, a man who would go months
without getting caught was methodically
setting fire to the half built condo complexes one by one.
1 in 10,000 residents is a billionaire--
the same article told me.
Though I could be forgiven for thinking the headlands were
burning again, the intervals between disasters collapsing.
I caught my neighbor's eye.
She was stretching on her stoop in a fantastic powder
blue tracksuit.
"What a world," I said.
And she did not seem to hear and jogged
across the narrow street.
The moon behind her rising or sinking, or neither--
it was hard to know.
Stevie-- that video is incredible
if you haven't seen it.
It's called-- "Wild heart."
It's the seed-- I think there's an important lesson, maybe,
to be learned.
And it's the seed of a song.
She's got like a line or two lines
that she repeats over and over again.
She's really young.
she's got something and she knows she has something.
That early moment is so precious, so special.
And that I shouldn't say this, but she turned it
into an actual song later.
It was not that good.
It's not.
Like, the early seed of it was so good.
Anyway, if you just Google--
Stevie Nicks backstage, "Wild Heart," you'll find it.
I've watched it hundreds, literally hundreds of times.