January 20, Milwaukee, WI - 1:32AM - central time

Last night (Thursday) i had my official Milwaukee book release at Mecca, a bar on Milwaukee's west side. This bar is owned by Dasha and her husband Kendall and they do a weekly open mic set which often has a featured poet who this time was me.

It was a great time and in what is probably this country's most segregated large city, i was really happy to have done my book release engagement in "the hood" as it were. Folks bought a lot of books and of course it was Dasha's joint so i drank for free all night - not necessarily a good idea but whatever...

Mecca itself is worth the time for a small bar with cheap drinks and a small dance floor enclosed on two sides with mirrors, you know for like... dancing. All sorts of folks bought my book, and when a sister with a weave extension and two gold fronts bought my joint, i knew i had mass appeal.

mecca also has one of those digital juke box thingies that comes up on a TV scren that you can randomize and hear all the eighties R&B you need to hear. it's a good time. add to that, that the bartender, Bowie, a six foot etc dreadlocked dude who is funny as hell is a fly-ass bartender and it's a good time.

Tonight i read at Woodland Pattern bookstore on the east side (more white side of town) and before we read we had dinner at Nessun Dorma - i do not know what this means - but they have about 512 different beers, a very cozy vibe and a waitress who is a roller derby athlete and there is nothing sexier and more violent than roller derby women.

Afterwards we went to Polish Falcons which has Jack Daniels for $3 - what?! - this is actually a Polish fraternal club so that one can also buy 6 packs to go. there is a six lane bowling alley in the basement where leagues are mostly played and there is open bowling night on wednesdays. nothing of particular interest happened there but i haven't been in so man-heavy a dar for a long while, not since andi and kendra took me to an italian fraternal after-hours joint in chicago about 4 years ago and we played pool in what seemed to be a bedroom in another time on the third floor.

tomorrow i head to madison. then i head back to chicago and who knows what'll happen then.

Saturday January 13, 2007 - 1:30PM - Pacific Time

Olympia, Washington.

So a prosecutor, two public defenders, a psychologist and a poet walk into a bar... thing is, i'm not even joking. The Brotherhood is a large, warm, clean, homey-feeling bar in downtown Olympia. It is on Capitol Way and was in the past a biker bar. Of course its clientele is now predominantly... hipster!

What strikes one immediately is not that folks seem to want to have long unneccessary conversations while standing at the urinal - though this too is alarming; i'm not your "bud" while i'm taking a piss - but the undue numbers of velvet wall-hangings depicting matadors in various poses. As if to make sure that one stays off-guard, the opposite wall is adorned with floor mat art (this is the only way i can describe this); small rectangles of carpet about the size of doormats with pictures of the Kennedy brothers... and Martin Luther King.
Perhaps more importantly though is that on the tables are advertisements for the Brotherhood's upcoming shows. Because this week is the annual international Elvis impersonator championships, the reigning champion is in town, performing his show - and i swear i'm not making any of this up -

"ELVIS Back 'n' Black - Elvis is Back. And he's black. He's Robert Washington. #1 Elvis in the world. See his story in the award-wining film ALMOST ELVIS, then see him live in concert!"

Because Washington State has been having some abnormal weather and because they do not know what to do with snow (even the meagre 2 inches they received), they have been not leaving their houses so the Bro-Ho was not as packed as i am told it can get, but we are hoping for excitement so we decide to leave. One of the public defenders; his name is David, an affable chap with a laid back sensibility, goes home -something about work the next morning, cases... pleas... blah blah blah - as does the pschologist. Again something about work and the next morning. She too is delightful and i wonder how much more trouble we could have accrued if this was a Friday night. So Eric - public defender number 2, originally of Vancouver, Can and Gwen - Thurston County prosecutor, and my connection to this whole shebang, and I head for Frankie's. originally the plan was to go to Hannah's, described to me as a redneck karaoke bar. Just before we leave the Brotherhood, someone says "we should go to Frankie's. that's even MORE redneck". of course i need to be told nothing more. off to Frankie's we go.
Frankie's is a two level establishment and it is huge. Becuae of the aforementioned bad weather, there are about 5 folks in attendance. There are two folks working the karaoke set-up, which is huge and features several screens all around the room. There are three folks up ahead at the bar and the bartender.

When we walk in everyone turns to the door. We occupy a booth, take off our coats and i make for the bar. From the point of our entrance, one of the bar patrons has been staring at us intently. He is yet to take his eyes off us in fact. He strikes me as being a 20 year younger version of Wilford Brimley (the Quaker Oats dude). He is wearing a leather vest over his denim shirt, which is tucked tight and fierce into his jeans which cover some sort of workboots. He is still staring when i begin the approximately 20 yard trek to the bar so i walk directly towards him without making eye contact.

When i get about ten feet from him, i turn to nod at him in a "Howdy Pardnah" sort of a way, because i'm well... well-manered. Old dude makes a sudden motion at me as if he's about to tackle me and says "Watch out there young fellah!!" Only thing is, i've been expecting any kind of foolishness from the time i started this trek and so i'm not surprised, which means i'm not startled and i don't flinch, and because i don't flinch, homboy momentarily takes on a look of utter consternation. His face says for an instant "oh shit, i think i fucked up this time!" of course, i just nod at him and say "good evening sir. how do you do?" just like that too, i said "how do you do?" Of course then i had to order Jack Daniels neat to keep up the tough guy image.
I return to the booth and head straight for the karako stand and order me up some Johnny Cash. I'm going to cover "i walk the line" becasue i love the fucking tune and because well... what better way to begin my karaoke career at this particular joint. Of course, my tough guy act takes a tumble when the next song i order up is by Sinead O'Connor. By then though, i think i'd made my point.

Meanwhile, Quaker Oats dude has gone up to order his song and the karaoke operator has to call out his name when his turn comes out. His name you ask? Drumroll please!... Red Dog!
Apparently (and i only find this out after we've left) Red Dog comes over to the table when i've left for the bathroom and gives Eric and Gwen chocolates!! Apparently, he hesitates before also putting a chocolate down in the space that i've vacated. I've no idea whether this is a peace offering or a fucked-up metaphor for the white folk who brought a nigra up in Frankie's.
Eventually i put a bow on the night by closing out my karaoke set with Roberta Flack's "First time ever i saw your face". i think the karaoke operator shed a little tear. Whether it is because of my full-of-pathos voice or because i butchered the song so thoroughly i cannot tell, but she was a little choked up. We left then, and headed back to Gwen's house where we closed things out with cheese sandwiches.

Last Night i went to Goldie's with several lesbians - because this is my life - and Daemond, Inti and Gwen, as part of a birthday party. Goldie's is in Seattle proper in the Wallingford section of town. Goldie's is garishly lit and pretty much features the colors red, gold and black throughout. However, there are 5 pool tables, 5 Dart Boards, 1 Air Hockey table, 1 PacMan table, Video Golf, Madden Football and something else, and really cheap beverages. Most importantly, there is a 3 minute photo booth, you know, the ones that give you that row of 4 pictures for 3 bucks.

I have to figure out what pictures i took, what is suitable for presentation to the public and then figure out how to scan them in and put them on this blog. Tonight my friend Koreen is going to pick me up. We're going to go boogie and then she'll take me directly to the airport for my 6 freakin' AM flight.
Word

Thursday January 11, 2007 - Olympia, WA - 7:13PM

I've decided that since i'm going to be blogging my road adventures that maybe i should find some way to categorize what specifically i'm blogging about in some way that is truly meaningful for the folks who might read it. and in thinking about what that might be i had to ask myself what i was truly qualified to speak on - aside from poetry and literature, because of course that would be hella obvious - and so i thought really hard and i've decided that in effect this tour's bloggin will evolve into a tavel memoir. and since i'm not always visiting very exciting locales, what could i blog about in my travels that might be interesting and useful to the reader at some point? and of course, i understood immediately that i had to blog about bars; you know, public houses, rum shops and the like.

so this is going to be a sort of weird Zagat's for alcoholics... and me. let's begin...

i'm in the Pacific Northwest which means first and foremost (cuz we're in winter) that it is dreary and grey and raining the whole time. what this means in turn is that one should stay indoors. however, if one stays indoors one's own house or place of stay, one contracts a virulent strain of cabin fever, but as luck would have it, i'm here on tour, to perform at venues throught the country and my tour begins, an hour and a half north of seattle in a town called bellingham. i am staying at daemond arrindell's place and daemond is extremely practical and organized so we set out well in advance of the gig and get there with two hours to spare. we are also hungry and i am... uhm... thirsty.

we call robert, the host of the reading series at which i will feature later and ask him where we can get a bite to eat and a beer. robert tells us to join him at The Beaver. now, the jokes we might insert here are way too obvious and i can hear them emanating from all your little brains so i will move on. daemond and i get to The Beaver, which in NYC would be called a dive bar. In Bellingham, it's just a bar, and the bartender (the only employee in the house) is a 20-something, pretty, white, woman who is bemusedly surly. i present her with my expired driver's license for ID and she says "...but this is expired". i'm flabbergasted. "Well Ma'am..." i begin, "here's the thing. the license is expired but i am not, and the information you seek - to wit, my date of birth - is still on this card, and since i am not presently driving and you aren't the police, can i have a drink?"

well maybe i wasn't THAT obnoxious, but i was obnoxious enough. this is a dive bar in bellingham, washington, with a bar that has fixed swivel barstools, two pool tables to the back, a juke box and really plain tables and chairs and they're trying to tell me i can't drink because my ID (which says i'm born in 1968) is expired. Kate - the bartender - explains that it's Washington State law and she's not trying to be a narc, but that she'll let me go since i'm with all those other guys whose IDs are valid. so in the end The Beaver comes through for me and the Beaver has really great french fries and the College Football finals are on and i get to pound two jack Daniels and two Sierra Nevadas before my feature.

After the feature we return to The Beaver, about 20 of us and we put on the jukebox and these fools play air hockey like it's the olympics. they take off their shirts and screma and carry-on and all in all The Beaver is good to me. The drinks are cheap (whiskey neat and beer together are $7.50) and the jukebox has a fairly good cross-genre selection of tunes. Add to that the free, very buttery popcorn and excellent steak fries and it's on to the break of dawn.

Tonight, i'm hanging out with my friend Gwen in Olympia, WA. We are going to two bars, The Brotherhood - known to the hipsters as Bro-Ho - and Hannah's which is a redneck karaoke bar. It should be a... hoot!

saturday december 30, 2006 - 11:49PM - Chicago, IL

Chicago, IL

Truth be told i wouldn't bring the new year in, in Chicago left to my own devices, but i'm here and it's all good.

i haven't blogged for a while and there are many things i've thought to blog about since ii last did and indeed, my thoughts on those things were coherent at the time i thought of them, but now... not so much. so this blog is the blog to try to get me back in the swing of tings. it will feature random understandings, proselytizations and sex. it will talk about ME a lot.

so MASQUERADE: poems of calypso and home is done (got done just before thanksgiving as a matter of fact) and now i understand why folks have to do previews before they put a show on. i've done ten shows and felt that i really hit my stride around show number 7. thing is, whenever i have a show, i spend the whole day preparing for it and "getting myself in the right frame of mind" and doing things like "centering myself". however, if you have a show everyday for say - six months, you can't center yrself all the time. somebody has to do the laundry and go shop for shoes and exotic cheeses at some point, so part of the learning about how to take this set of poems to theatre has been about how to live a whole normal life and be a professional at the same time day in and day out. let me tell you folks, you have to reserve a part of you for mid day cocktails and stil have the resources necessary to put on a kickass show at 7pm. it aint easy! still, it got done and apparently i'll be getting into the hip-hop theatre festival this coming summer- at least here in new york, if not in other cities too.

i like sex - a lot... i said in the subject that i'd talk about sex so i'm just delivering...

two days ago i'm waiting in KARMA (ist ave between 3rd and 4th streets) for milica. i'm having wine and smoking Gauloises (it is one of the few bars left in which you can smoke. there are hookahs and everything). i'm rapt in CLR James' "Beyond a Boundary" a book which i've read before but am now re-reading because i'm in the midst of so many poems about cricket that i want to reconnect to the game's and history's most formidable commentator on the politics of the sport, vis a vis being black in a colonial gentleman's game (more on this later). i look up and the bar is full. smoke is thick in the air and folks are chatting up a storm. i'm in the midst of reading and feeling that way one feels when you're really enjoying a bit of prose and feeling as you read like you're being filled up. as though epiphany is enveloping you just then, and i look up and there is one other black person sitting at the bar. he is also reading. he is rapt. we are the only two people reading i the bar - the two black men here in new york city. it feels positively paris left bank in a james baldwin chillin with nina simone sort of way. for some reason this gives me succor. on a christmas when james brown dies, gerald ford tries to steal the show and somehow the only teo people reading in a manhattan bar are two black men, i decided the world is being redeemed as we speak. milica comes in. she says in her perfectly aggressive serbian accent "what the FUCK is worng with christmas??!!" i couldn't agree more...

sex is really really good...

the book is selling well. 800 copies so far as a matter of fact and it hits stores officially next month. if you wanted to buy it on amazon and you got on it tomorrow - before jan 1 - you'd get it at significant discount. check it out "tarnish and masquerade". it's really strange, but now there are these poems before me and i'm not sure if they're going to represent growth when they appear, but i can't think about that when i'm writing i just have to write the poems and hope to hell i can get out of the way long enough to know what each poem wants. lynne asked patrick and i last night if - and let me see if i can recall the syntax of the question well enough - if we thought that the hyper self-awareness of the culture in which we now lived impacted the work we created in a way that was any different - for btter or worse - than in cultures before ours. in fact she said, "we are so much more 'therapied' than at any other point in history that it might be impossible to gauge whether ot not the art is coming from any place of innocence or naivete at all..." she went on to inquire whether or not that would hinder or help our work. after $200.00 worth of whiskey and beer we could not of course definitively answer that question but what we did come to - or maybe this was what i came to - was that the act of deciding to be a poet is i any age a demonstration of hyper self-awareness and that therefore that self-awareness can only be relative to the self-awareness of the society/age in which we live. it is impossible to figure out if we have or haven't undercut the "purity" the "honesty" of our direction, because the decision to arite is already one of self-awareness. we only hope that we can get out of our way enough to make honesty and truth bear upon craft enough (or vice versa depending on yr standpoint) to make the work, work.

so this one time i was having sex, right...

i now own a huge belt buckle with two six-shooters crossed, inlaid with rhinestones.

i am now 6-1 in drunken sprinting. buddy wakefield beat me when he was in new york, but i was wearing boots and i'da caught him if it was a full 100 meters. i'm kicking yr ass in seattle in a week and a half, Buddy - 100 meters after significant imbibage. it's on!

the dude in my local gym asked me if i travel so much because my job is as a professional soccer player. if i still look like i might be in some way shape or form capable of that, i'm not doing badly.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez' "100 years of solitude" is gangsta!!!!

C L R James is to West Indian socio-political thought and more importantly black west indians; what Cornell West is to socio-political thought here.

i promise i'll blog more. i'm going on the road from jan 7 to march 18. i'm a hoot when i'm in other folks' cities. ask anybody. there'll probably be photos. stay tuned.

i love Jesus but Christmas is whack!!

laters

Wednesday October 25, 2006 - 6:41AM

There is way too much to really tell since the last time i updated but let me start with this. I've been to Milan and lost my phone there (God, i STILL love saying that!)

It was a great three days. I was there with VisionIntoArt (www.visionintoart.com – y'all should really check them out – we're playing at the STONE on halloween night). i had forgotten that Europe has no fat people, no one laboring under hormonally inkected meats and vegetables with catfish genes spliced in to keep them fresh.

It's a mind fuck to walk around a place, walk into folks' homes which are older than this whole country. Anyway, it was a great time and we had a great show and as a result, we'll be off to Sicily in March and Venice in July. I'ma act the fool in Europe this summer is all i'm going to say about that.

Once back, it was preparing for my book release party which just happened this Friday past. Preparing for my book release party means that largely i was preparing for my mother's arrival which frankly gave me as much pause as the impending book did. Most of us have this weird love/frustration thing with our mothers. For me i think it is that i've felt as though there is no way i could ever please her. In fact the last five times we've spent time in the same place, her visit (or my visit) would end with a litany of what was wrong with my life (last visit included the now famed asking me if i was gay – that's now legend and i'm not going to go into that whole story). Suffice to say i was trying my best to not allow anything to comment on this time. We (Marty and I) cleaned the house. I mopped the floors, I did windows. Okay let me say that again. I did WINDOWS. I washed venetian blinds. i threw shit out. I polished the bedroom floor, the kitchen floor, the living room floor, the bathroom floor. I'm talking about Mop 'N Glow here bitches! recognize! My mom got here and my mom – and check how even with all the tension i was anticipating my mom is still better than your mom – my mom, brought me a Maasai spear. My mom thought, based on a book i had as a child called 'Tall as a Spear' that my book release was good occasion for me to have an authentic Maasai Spear. So she Fed-Exed it from Trinidad so that it got here while she was here (cuz she figured Homeland Security might have questions about trying to travel with a spear on an international flight).

What i'm saying is this people, don't fuck with me. I'm rolling with a double tipped spear on the NYC subways. What?!

So i'm trying to keep my mother entertained (she moved over to Lynne's place after the first day because she wasn't about to fuck with the fourth floor walkup for 10 days straight) and i'm trying to get things done for the book release party and for my one-man show which comes up in less than 2 weeks. It's hctic and my nerves are becoming more and more frayed. I'm tired as shit, but before we even get there, on my Mom's second day here, it is the Cave Canem 10 year reunion so i take her to the readings. She enjoys them immensely and folks line up to meet my mom and all of a sudden i think it dawns on her that i'm part of a community which respects some of what i do. Moreover, my friends all did a good job gassing me up to my Mom. On about day 4, she meets Colin Channer (Jamaican novelist) who says for the 75th time that weekend, “you must be so proud...” etc etc. My mother says to him (in my presence) “well... he didn't do what i wanted him to do, but he did what i wanted to do.”

My world just stopped. This is the largest and most cathartic kind of approval i think to get from one's mother. If you asked for approval in writing it couldn't get more satisfying than that. In addition, she got to meet Linton Kwesi Johnson, legendary Jamaican dub poet, and the author of the first book of poems ic an remember my mother ever giving me “Dread Beat and Blood”.

So by the time the book release party comes around, i'm wound fairly tight, but let me say this. Folks really rallied around me for this one. Lynne refused to let me get panicked, Marty refused to let me get panicked, Fish plugged my show to the nth degree. My production company terraNOVA collective represented hard as did my publishers Cypher Books.

So i'm thinking, if i get 200 folks out and 50 books sold, it's a successful night. It's a coup. Close to 500 folks came through and i sold close to 200 books and my Uncles Wole and Femi and my Aunt Beverly and Marty's parents came through and my brother Jamil was there and i had a good performance and everything was way flyer than i thought it could be and so...

...now it's 6:30AM and i can't sleep so i'vegot up to do a boatload of the work that my director hasgiven me for the show. So the show starts Nov 7. It runs from the 7th to the 11th, then the 14th and the 16th to the 19th. It's gonna be a blast and i think better than when you last saw it this past summer. That's about that. I should try to get back to bed now. I've been up for over an hour already.

Saturday August 26th, 2006 - Noon

so i left my house on friday evening with the express purpose of going to get terrance hayes' new collection, "wind in a box". i also managed to cop major jackson's new collection "hoops", hayes' previous collection "hip logic" and brigit peegen kelly's "song".

let me say this about that. don't walk. run!! and go get all these collections if they aren't already on yr shelves. i hadn't embarked upon a "spree" like this for a long while (together with a new notebook and the gnarls barkeley joint - $100) and i don't regret a penny of it.

hayes' "wind in a box" is testimony to a voice that i think we'll mention in the same breath as 'neruda', when it's all said and done. jackson's "hoops" is not to be outdone though, incredible as that seems, and eventually we'll mention him in the same breath as 'hughes' and 'hayden'.

hayes' lyricism is so effortless and so in the vain of unpretentious, street-wise, savant, that you feel drawn into something entirely magical and crunk at the same time (yeah i said it!). and the endings! the endings! nothing of either hayes or jackson's endings is ever easy, ever predictable. everything has just the sort of flourish or flatline one thinks is needed to turn the screw in your brain or the knife in your gut just then, and if my ankle wasn't iced down and elevated right now i'd actually go get the book and hit you with a few choice lines, but check back next week if you haven't copped it by then.

in fact, kelly's 1994 collection wasn't one i had planned on picking up on friday. i saw the book and because i knew the title poem, i checked it out, and ending after ending after ending was breathtaking and i had to get that too.

after my ankle is un-iced, you might get some of those lines too but an evening spent at the minor-league ball-park in coney island, followed by russian food, vodka, and running sprints on the boardwalk against ove, in heavy boots with an ankle already trying to recover from a sprain, was just too much.

so, i'm headed to the gym now and then to lincoln center, because i perform there this afternoon, and that's how i roll.

one,

r

Friday July 14, 2006 - Iowa City, IA - 10:53PM (Central Time)

1.

- Red knee-length shorts (or swim trunks / because of the sprinklers)

- Green Mexican National team football shirt

- sneakers (Champion brand from Payless $24.99)

This is a rabbit-hunting uniform. It allows for mobility, easy breathability. The shorts protect from rug-burns to upper thighs if dive or slide tackle is required to snag the rabbit.

Note: The Marriot Resort and Spa at Desert Ridge will not be held indemnible for any injuries incurred while hunting any of the wild rabbit which overrun the property.

2.

a. when the key from the forklift would not start the golf-cart, we decide to head for the golf course on foot. The visibility was particularly good. A slightly waning moon high in the night sky lit the way, so that we could see the path and the greens fairly clearly and were therefore less concerned than we should have been about the rattlesnakes of which Connie (helpful staff person) had warned us.

b. A flag from the green on the first hole par-3 makes an interesting javelin. In addition, by unscrewing the knob at the top of the pole, you can remove the entire flag to bring with you as a souvenir.

c. the smaller putting-green flags make excellent lances and can double as a driver if the ball is visible enough.

3.

A rabbit will allow you (if you are stealthy enough) to get within 10 yards of it (about 2 strides if you get good traction and oush off).

This does not guarantee you will catch one, however. One must allow for the rabbit's amazing cornering abilities. If you try to cut the corner off and tackle from the angle, you will find that part of the reason for the long ears are to gauge the speed and wind direction change so as to understand from what direction and how fast predators are coming. as such, to get your hands on one and tag its ear with the sharpie in your pocket, you have to fake one direction and almost immediately go the next way and hope you've predicted the animal's counter-move correctly.

(other auxiliary requirements: 1 bottle bacardi, 1 bottle ocean spray grapefruit juice- the 100% juice kind. this is rabbit-hunting fuel, a healthy pair of lungs, nowhere important to be the next morning, like... and airport or anything)

4.

Glenn Singleton's presentation on Conversations about race in education (see: Courageousn Conversation about Race) was brilliant. He weaves the data about the disparity in results between white and non-white students into an understanding of the ways in which the system works to continuously undermine the efforts of black and latino youth. for the work Maureen and i are attempting to get done, around teacher training in this field, his work is central, pivotal, ground-breaking. what this conference has taught us (amongst other things) is that our work needs far broader scope and long-term commitments from schools and their staffs in order to be able to impact education realistically; and in the long term, commitments from folks up and down the hierarchy of district and state education

5.

116 degrees... is 116 degrees. there is no such thing as "dry heat". If you walk 200 meters and want to vomit, then it's freakin hot! i never again want to be told... "but New York is humid. THAT's the problem. i'd rather 100 degrees of dry-heat than 90 and humid..." Bullshit!! and this from a man who makes it a policy never to complain about heat.

6.

Jesse Dylan Grace is fabulous! She rocks! and she is going to get me colorful cowboy boots. her dragonfly tattoo is awesome and to get 'tight' with someone after two nights of hanging out, two years apart is a good feeling.

7.

Forest fires are beautiful from the air...