What was the mood? How were people responding? Who was
there? Who wasn’t there? ________.
—Lindsey Boldt in an SFMOMA talk on the
“Poetry Labor Conference” held in Oakland
on 9/5/2010 (from an issue of TRY magazine)
Hello from just east of Alpine, Texas [see IMG_6679.jpg]. Big wave
hello from the desolation and beauty that is West Texas. Hi!
Lindsey hits it right on the head for me, happily unemployed for
nearly two years (at 44!), happily employed in a motley crew of
jobs pretty much constantly for the previous 28 years.
POET 15 years now
spinning and buzzing around a meat hook. Hello from Texas.
Hello from the dust of a thousand vibrating sound bites or
something. Hello from the painful kidney and the uninterrupt-
ible southern California partyscape where somewhere in time
we’ll return triumphant.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is the town of Marathon. Marathon
is a cowboy town and the mountains in Mexico are much higher
than ours. About an hour from now we’ll go through another
old cowboy town called Sanderson.
Stressed, rainy. Stressed from a weekend of bugs (and buggy
fun). Unstressed from the dancefloor I can remember on
Saturday at Mezzanine as the evening sags (fucking trousers
falling down, some annoying folk singer, and losing my
glasses). I do seem rather helpless.
So hello from the special problems of the world around me,
or me using each as loudspeaker. And hello from dust, or the
bathless, showerless gift that is sitting for days on end in the
Texas Eagle, hello from partying and doing nothing, hello
from lists and Mormons and train conductors and from the
still fully clothed bones of ‘illegals’ – of Ponce de Leon’s
fountain of youth – found (time will tell, time will tell) in
the heart of Arkansas. Hello from the telethon of hope
and despair; hello from...
