A poem, I thought, I understood as an 

opening, a cracked window maybe, or a 

hole in the wall, something I could shimmy through 

and then I would be inside a space, ceilings 

so high, a lush symphony, elaborate, 

filled with movements and all sorts of sounds. I thought

I could fall into the singing, that whoosh. And 

so because at first I thought I wanted an 

opening in the tautness of tradition, 

I glitched this whoosh. I fragmented it into 

words or took away its deictics. A poem, 

I understood. For years I lived for what was

poetry. I used poetry to shimmy 

in, during these years, to build the compounded

patterns of song, even if I recognized 

poetry’s verses as songs that tend toward

institutional. I thought that poetry 

could be apart from the nation still. I thought 

that two sorts of poets existed: poets 

who write the terrible nation into an 

existence and poets fucking around to

do something else. For years I was Team Poets 

Fucking Around and Doing Something Else. A 

poem, I understood, as a thing read. And 

I lived not just for the reading but for that 

moment after the reading too. Both the one

where I put down the book and realized I 

had been made something other by the words 

and the one where I sat in chairs and listened

to the patterns, to the spew of the words that

often had no discernable pattern but

in which I still found meaning floating, sudden,

arriving as the crack of thunder moments

later. I loved the way the abstraction let

me experience my mind clinch and hold tight.

I lived too for when we had to leave the bar 

because the poetry reading was over. 

Often it was Friday or Saturday night 

and the bars were full of the couples who were 

willing to pay for the two drink minimums

so we would keep walking, looking in each bar 

and each one wrong. Eventually the streets 

would open up and we would be at the bridge

and there would be a river and we would walk

across the open space to it and climb down 

its sides and sit. We would have bought some beers and

a small flask of whiskey from a bodega.

We would have carried the cans and the flask in 

brown bags as a convention. But we did not 

need this convention. If there was law, the law 

drove by, didn’t stop. Other things were. Night. Maybe

moon. Water. Rats. Sometimes drugs were involved. We

walked through Wall Street at three in the morning once,

rattling the locked doors of all the buildings, then

there laughing at their absurd lights and gilt as

we knew where it was at and it was there at

the rattling of the doors of gilt money. It

was not as if we did not fight. We did. It

was not a paradise, barely a thing that

could be called community. We accepted

too much, were probably too often quick to

accept, seeing things reprehensible as

a sign of the long tradition. A poem, 

I understood, as a way to slip away 

from the hold of the family, the couple 

form, the endless policing of thought, also

everything else that was other than a rich

constant and graceful stretch of openness and

possibility. A road, an exit sign,

a left turn. A poem, I understood, as 

words arranged according to some syllabic 

convention. Rimbaud’s line of eleven count

syllables. And yet Cesaire’s verrition too.

The poem, I understood, had rules and then 

more rules so many that the result was no 

rules mattered that much finally. A poem,

I understood, as a room that could be pried

open by possibility. A room in 

Vancouver, early days in the twenty-first 

century, where Jeff Derksen said poetry 

is a form of atypical thinking and 

I wrote it in a notebook, then wrote his

name beside it. I hold on to this still. Oh,

so many poems I understood to be

something divine during these years. There was the

Rukeyser one with the line about the year

the fires would not stop and the world was under

war-shadow. A poem with oranges and

wild cups of silence, the spectacular gift

of revolution. That Shelley poem that

has Hope, that maniac maid, walk out of the fog,

ankle deep in blood, having just slayed all the

assholes. The Whitman one addressed not to

comrades but to the love of comrades. It was

these moments that kept me with poetry a

long time. Since I was a teenager, searching

for meaning. Those loves of many years and our

bodies changing together. A poem, I 

understood as about together, about 

how we were together like it or not. I 

used a metaphor of breath and of space. I 

embraced all that was epiphanic, used it

to write long poems where each line claimed to be

epiphany, rather than just the end,  as 

was the lyric convention. I counted the 

syllables and filled them with lists of flora 

and fauna and called it an elegy. I 

joked I had found a sweet spot. I could write a 

poem that was too broken for the lyric 

poets and too lyric for everyone else.

A poem, I understood. Just as one day 

I looked inside a lily, Catalina 

Mariposa Lily. One day I said oh 

there is an entire world in the throat, a high 

contrast zone as they say, and it was so like 

walking out into a field at night and there

looking up at stars. I understood I could 

not ever write a poem that in any 

way had such complexity, variation

as this throat and this galaxy and all that 

it held in between, the lizards, mosquitos, 

land crabs, the nervous activity of red 

ants and cockroaches, muted sky too, bleak 

wasteland, swallows flying low. A poem, 

I understood as a theory of the 

places I knew, the spirals of the rivers 

and brooks, the forests, the woods, the coppices,  

the pastures, the towns, and the boroughs. A 

poem, I understood as the fire ants that 

latch onto each other and form a living 

mound that floats on the water’s surface, so as

to survive and also birds that get into

the end of the hurricane’s spiral and then 

move inward toward the calm until they are 

moving with the eye. The theory that makes

up the earth, which is also the theory 

of the sea, the theory of the city,

and of the large politics of the states, as 

the theory of taking flight. A poem, 

I understood, was the moments where I might 

be able to think I could possibly so

briefly touch something, and yet still bring it to

my throat so as to let it spill out my hand 

as a way of atypical thinking. I 

knew I used epiphanic lists of flora 

and fauna too much to claim it as a way

to make new and I would try for a while to 

stop and then realize that really that 

listing was all that mattered to me. I had 

so little devotion to a poem I 

understood as anything other. I had 

no desire for a poem that did not at

least stop to notice the soft brown throat of this

Catalina Mariposa Lily and 

also the stars and the discourse they shared that 

I could not hear and never would be able 

to understand, and yet imagining it

was everything that had matter. 

^ 

When a stick shot across the crowd, it landed at my feet.

Then the kid next to me picked it up and ran back into the

fight screaming take this antifa, stick raised over his head.

I saw it come down on two heads at the same time. That

was all I saw because someone chasing someone else ran

between us and they sprayed bear mace so I looked away,

eyes tearing. What I mean here is that it was a time of

sticks, not of poems. A time of sticks and a time of a

series of street brawls between fa and antifa that

sometimes absurdly tumbled into the Berkeley all organic

full of strollers farmers market. And also a time of guns

which meant it was also a time when I started to go to the

shooting range. There I would be, hands shaking, the gun

so heavy, the smell of sulfur in the air, sweeping the

cartridges so deep on the floor into the bin at the end. A

time too when a well known comrade, angry because of

unrequited love and wanting to take it out on someone

proximate to the one they beloved, began posting on

facebook about showing up at my office with a gun. A

time when friends bought bulletproof vests, a precaution

that at first felt absurd to me even though I knew that

people had been shot at various street brawls in other

cities. Not just a time of street brawls, some won, some

lost, but a time when things burned. A time when the fire

began to the north and to the south, clustered inland, then

spread in both directions then made it to the sea. A time

when there was nothing to do really but watch the fire

burn and breathe the smoke that rolled down the street and

into the house. A time not just when things burned but

when near hurricane level winds carried the fire across

highway 1. A time when there were no longer any air

purifiers for sale because the smoke was everywhere. So a

time too of supply chain collapse. And a time of social

intensity. A time when the DMs and the @s came in from

all different directions, so fast and furious as if they were a

franchise. The Fast and the Furious that was about the

editor. Then 2 Fast 2 Furious about the managing editor

followed by the time when The Fast and Furious: Tokyo

Drift was about myself and then the time when I initiated

Fast & Furious which was about you. A time when I

wanted to say I’m sorry, by which I mean sorry that I took

your work so seriously that I thought it mattered, sorry for

working out my own heart that hurts all over your work,

sorry also for feeling terrible when someone else did the

same to me. A time when I felt I had to call my mom and

tell her that her name was on 4-chan under a post that

began “here are a bunch of commie jew faggots.” A time

when I then had to explain not that she was the commie

jew faggot, it was because she had birthed me. A time too

when 4-chan’s anonymity was not really the default

because the brawlers were no longer afraid to show their

faces and had activated an instagram account where they

shared their t-shirt designs, their Nordic tattoos, their gym

begotten muscles too. A time when a white nationalist

began posting pictures of his arsenal in South Africa and

saying he was coming for my family. So again and again a

time of guns. A time full of days when there was no sun,

the smoke so thick. It was a time of demands for apologies

and a time of refusals to accept the apologies that were

offered in response to the demand. A time when I began to

learn the rhythms, how it peaks around forty-eight hours

then it’s all over, a friend jokes, when Tucker finally

tweets about it. A time when I often gave up, waited for

Tucker to tweet as it were. A time when I could no longer

tell what was comedy, what was farce, what was merely a

meme. A time when one day in Berkeley, a day of many

brawls at the farmers market, a dumpster was pushed back

and forth, an antifa shove followed by an Oath Keeper

shove followed by an antifa shove followed by an Identity

Evropa shove. A time when everything, even a meme,

seemed like it could turn more serious. And a time when I

knew about the terribleness of 4-chan trolls but also a time

when I knew they were likely irrelevant combined with

the double bind of living with the idea of the likely

irrelevance of 4-chan trolls and yet also knowing that there

were moments in history when considering Nazis

irrelevant didn’t go well at all. A time of days when there

was no sun, only red haze so thick. And yet not a time in

which I was important or mattered. A time when there is

no denying I got the least of it; no one in the legislature

tried to pass a law that I should be fired. And I don’t mean

to imply it was all bad. It was also a time when someone

punched that Nazi in the face and for once the gods were

on my side and there was a camera which meant I got to

watch him get punched over and over. A time when the

internet then had one of those wonderful moments of

harmony as everyone felt compelled to do their version of

setting the punch to music and I watch the punch first to

Celine Dion and then to Bruce Springsteen and then it’s

on. A time when I watch at least thirty versions and I am

here to tell you that the best one was clearly the one set to

“Let It Go,” the first punch in the face on the word “let”

the second punch to the gut on the word “go.”  A time of

oh, those nights when the fight felt vital and all was not

yet lost. A time when so many dance parties played one of

the many versions of “Fuck tha Police” that are available

in this time and the costumed seethed together in a shared

hatred of fascism and I joined in, awkwardly seething too.

A time of these moments of triumph, oh so fleeting, oh so

trivial in the face of the daily. A time when there were

avatars on twitter who acted as if they knew, who would

sometimes lecture-tweet: those of you who don’t notice

how fascism arrives, I can assure you it isn’t on cat’s feet.

A time thus when avatars on twitter assumed most had not

read the history, that most had never felt the sharpness of a

cat’s claws. But it was a time when I cohabitated with

cats, so it wasn’t that I didn’t notice. I did. I understood.

Because it was a time when I read history books. But also

a time when there was little that a poem, I understood. A

time when I could not figure out how to write that

epiphanic line of possibility. A time when it was never

clear what to do, poetry or otherwise. A time when some

gathered their children close and decided to wait it out. A

time when others photographed the day with no sun and

posted it on their socials. Still others left the consciousness

of earth. Some of these others momentarily, through

powders and pills. Too many of them left permanently. A

time when I asked one who came back from death what it

was like over there and he said nothing; it is nothing; there

is nothing on the other side. And I couldn’t help thinking:

just like a poem, another sort of nothing. So a poem, I

understood, had no room for this life in this moment. A

time when the nights with the fights felt vital. A time

when I would say, I am lost, and they would say come

down to the plaza. I would say ok and suit up, by which I

mean I would put on my jeans and my running shoes and

my many layers of flannel and stick a water bottle in my

bag. Then I would meet them there in the late afternoon

light. Often it was winter so it would be dark soon.

Sometimes it was summer with hours of light still. I would

mill around, listen to others declaim, perhaps nodding my

head at those I recognized, maintaining that decades-old

convention of detached cool. Last week was a time when

dark came early and suddenly the moms were getting

teargassed, despite their big red heart shaped signs

designed to say don’t hit me; I’m a mom; I craft. A time

when some sort of feds, I didn’t even know who they

were, were disappearing people. A time when I learned the

term “show of force” was also a helicopter maneuver. A

time when even though I knew to show the fuck up I

couldn’t or didn’t or was too tired. And then there was the

rest of life. A time when I went to little league games as

often as I talked about revolution. More often than I talked

about poetry. Like the song of summer the foul ball always

came out of nowhere. And all the kids each time ran for it.

This would happen multiple times each game. I’ve got it.

I’ve got it. They all would yell this. I’ve got it. Rarely did

anyone have it. Sometimes I wore my Sappho hat and at

other times I wore the one that says HOWL to these

games. I refused the one that says Spicer, but that’s

another story. In the hours before dusk the light is

luminous and I recognized it at the time as the poem of the

breeze. A time when the song of the summer was the one

about Old Town Road. I hated it at first and then I loved it.

But that time I saw the kids screaming it as they walked

away from the baseball field one night, I knew there’s just

life and it goes on, poem or not, I understood.