I'll read two more poems.
Thank you very much.
I also want to thank my dear friend and former teacher, Steve
Orlen, who taught me everything I know.
I lived in Berkeley, California for a while,
and there was a moment when I realized that it
wasn't the right place for me.
I was talking to a woman who had a job-- she had two jobs.
She was a media handler, which meant
she handled visiting artists and writers,
and took them around to their engagements,
and back and forth from their hotel.
And then she was also a dream consultant.
She had a card for both those functions.
God bless her.
Incidentally, she was handling a friend of mine,
and she asked me how I liked the Bay Area, and I said, it's OK.
And quick as a whip, she said, if you don't love it,
you have to leave.
So, OK.
And so that's and that's what this poem is about.
It's called Here In Berkeley, and the title is the first line.
Here in Berkeley, the jogger in the Rastafarian sweats
runs past the mechanic reading Marx on lunch break,
with a sprout sandwich for a bookmark
as the sunlight through a bottle of Perrier
wobbles little rainbows on his knee.
On the corner, someone wearing I Ching earrings
is talking about personal space, how she just
can't take it anymore, the way that Marcia's codependency
defeats her own empowerment.
The whole seminar is such a cheap shot, isn't it?
It's so easy.
The whole seminar is out of whack,
she says, slapping a bouquet against her leg.
Close your eyes, swing a baguette horizontally,
you'll hit someone with a PhD in sensitivity,
who if not a therapist himself, will offer you
the number of his therapist, which, it may take you years
to figure out, is a hostile act on his part,
disguised as charity, designed to send you on a wild goose
chase through the orchard of your childhood,
to fetch the tarnished apple of your mother's love.
And if you don't like it, there might
be something wrong with you.
You might be so reincarnationally headed
in the wrong direction that you can't hear the music hovering
above this zone of crystal salesman and holy mountaineers.
Now the traffic lights harmonically converge.
The traffic flows past the bakeries and bookstores,
past the cappuccino depot and the acupuncture center.
No matter how you feel, you have to act
like you were very popular with yourself,
very relaxed and purposeful, very unconfused,
and not like you are walking through the sunshine
singing in chains.