My First Solo Apartment, 1996

throughout college i had roommates, later, i futon-surfed my way through the east & west village in the nyc, by the time i landed in san francisco during the fall of 1996 i was done with roommates for good, that is when 204a day street found me, a 3-minute walk from my job at the 30th street senior center where i was the bilingual (spanish) volunteer coordinator, $540 a month & it was mine, when i first moved in i had a cot to sleep on, 6 cds, & a plant, spartan, no question, apartment highlights included: getting up at 5am to admire comet hale-bopp from my roof, hosting thanksgiving & a paella dinner party, listening to sonny rollins on sundays while cooking pasta -my solo sf apartment adventure ended when i moved to paraguay in 1998, but there are moments when i daydream about studio-living, less really was more.

He Pretends To Be A Poet

He pretends to be a poet, but does he even like poetry?
Sawgrass shallows, dark forests and trellises, the
language of description, erudition, evoked through so
much longing to be heard, to be read. But what does

it mean? Instead, he writes about what he knows,
which most nights seems like not a lot, sometimes silence
or that most mundane of all arts, parenting, being a dad,
or he reads half pages of zen books while munching on

frozen blueberries, while trying to remember the pickup time
for ballet. No, he doesn’t live in Paris or London, or
New York, although San Francisco is a writerly city, that frigid
foggy place where he was once young, and a real poet

in his studio apartment with Chinese takeout night after night,
the J Church train rumbling, urban soundtrack mixed with
Sonny Rollins, oh yes, he was cool, back in the day, but now
he sits in the kitchen, barefoot, wondering where his socks are.