Never Ending Poetry

Since the East Bay Poetry Summit ended, I have been exhausted. I keep taking naps. At first, I thought I had caught Steve's cold, which he battled valiantly throughout the weekend, even serving as DD for masses of drunken poets (DPs?), but now I'm not so sure. No snot, no cough, just spaciness and exhaustion.

Today, during my very last poetry class of the year, teaching 6th graders on the second to last day of school (terrible idea), as their teacher, Betty, who was teaching her second to last day before retirement (boy, and did she let everyone know), took over the class and basically constructed an exchange policy: write a poem in the shape of your favorite thing in exchange for a Capri Sun. I gave up on my plan to write Odes after Neruda and began to draw a mind map with my favorite thing at the center: "sleep". I thought of all the words to describe sleep : luxurious, lush, refreshing, soft, then all of the actions that describe how sleep acts or is acted upon: drift off, crash, slumber, ease into. For the first time teaching (maybe) ever, I actually watched the minutes tick by. When the bell rang, I slunk off ashamed of myself for succumbing to the embattled conditions of the classroom, for not bringing the class to a screeching halt and invoking the racaous spirit of the weekend into the classroom and infecting all the youngins with it, easing them into summer with a taste for risk. In that, I utterly failed. Instead, I walked around the block to eat two delicious pupusas, drink a Mexi-coke, then make my way back to Oakland and "crash out" hard into a "luxurious" "slumber".

Since the East Bay Poetry Summit ended, all I want to do is watch "The Neverending Story". This is the level of intellectual engagement I can handle right now and I crave it. I type "The Neverending Story" into the search engine of the illegal torrent site of my choice because Netflix does not have my movie, Hulu does not have my movie. If they had, I would have watched my movie on Tuesday. It is only today, Thursday, that I muster the wherewithal to download it. This movie is my destiny. It has something to say to me that I need to hear. Maybe just that I am a layabout who lives in a fantasty world. I click on the least scary sounding link, with the least gobbledygook, and watch the download window fill with a rewarding blue. My movie is nearly ready for me.

Should I watch it alone? The summit reminded me of my love for my fellow man, specifically poets. Crazy fuckers. My kind of crazy fuckers. Smarter than me kind of fuckers who read all the dang time, but still my kind of crazy fuckers.

Maybe it's the Gemini in me, but I learn by being on the move, sucking up experiences and chatting with the inhabitants of the unfamiliar. I needed the blood transfusion that was this weekend. Thank you all, you out-of-town-poets, you demonstrate the necessity of chaos. When the cosmos gets stale, bring on the sacred monsters.

 My natural state is the road trip. Steve and I are going to take one, a long one, with The Starcraft Mobile Library so that we can be with all of you out-of-town poets again. You're much too far away now. You should all come back. We'll figure something out. It will be good.

I tweet, I tweet, I tweet. "#poets I just downloaded The Neverending Story if anyone wants to watch it."

We should only ever be laying in a cuddle puddle. We should only ever be on the move. We should only ever be listening to houses speak poetry from back yards. We should only ever be dancing to a quiet jukebox like the backroom of Lukas were a spring break party pool.

Like Alli said, "How do we go back to work? We can do so much."

So we take it to the lake. Then we take it on tour. We make a caravan of our asses and we bump it on down the road. We don't stop, get it, get it, because this is what we were made to do and we're so good at it.