The Work

If I remember right, which I often don’t, the first relationship I ever fucked up, I mean really ruined, was the first girl I ever told I loved. Granted, I was thirteen, awkward, and she was popular, known in certain circles for having filled in early and for putting out. When I consider the ways I’ve used the word since then, the rigorous struggle and pure reward of the relationships I’ve been a party to throughout the years, the sentiment I felt as a nascent teen was likely closer to confusion. Love was something I wanted to believe and feel because it meant I got to get my hands dirty without being like the rest of the boys, the kids who gathered in the lull between classes to brag about it to each other in the halls of school. In hindsight, I was hardly any different, just quieter and less assured of my position in the pecking order, though, to my credit, whatever the feeling was, at the time I felt it with all the terror and ferocity of which my virgin heart was capable.

Ultimately, her name is not important. I say this not as an insult or as a means to diminish someone who obviously is an actual person with an actual history and life, but because I doubt she needs me speaking of her in public, which I am doing. Plus, I imagine she is married now, with children and the rest, and though she’ll never read this, I feel I owe her, at the very least, a gesture of anonymity. What is important, though, and what continues to bother me about the way I so spontaneously bailed on a person who cared about me and who was, for the most part, good to me, is the extent to which I wonder why it seems to keep on happening.

With her, it was a matter of my leg, my left knee specifically, which I shattered in the center of Hobbes Ice Arena playing hockey the summer 0f 1993, just before High School. This meant two things—I couldn’t walk, and I couldn’t see my friends. That summer was the first real amount of time I didn’t spend with the people I had been playing hockey with since I learned to skate at the age of six. Mostly, I laid in my room, read books and listened to Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails. By the time I could move around again I was a different boy altogether.

Those three months engrossed in Kurt Cobain lyrics changed everything for me, not only because I started putting people into categories and painting myself as somehow other than the rest, more alternative, and thus, more authentically alive than other people, but, for the first time, language became the center of my life. I poured through those lyric books. I knew every song by heart, what every song meant, or what I thought it meant, what the reasons were he wrote them and what he must have felt to sing like that, that sad growl growing violent in the chest and making sense. Lying in my bed alone, with my girlfriend and former friendships far away, with the person I was before and that I would never be again also far away, I understood that he needed those words specifically and no others. I wrote my first bad poems that summer, lyrics really, to a music I couldn’t make and that I’ve been chasing ever since.

In hindsight, she didn’t have a chance. I desired a different kind of person, someone who I could walk around with and people could look at us and be disgusted. And we, the next girl and I, we would relish in that disgust, knowing that we would never be like them, would never wallow in the mediocrity of being normal or waste our energy pursuing a way of life that didn't really matter. I wanted to be alternative, then punk. I wanted to be in a band, and then, when that didn't happen, I wanted to be a poet. And she was neither of those things. She could be other things, but she could never be those things. And so I left her, shallow as I was, without an explanation.

So much of the business of leaving, it seems, is like that, without an explanation. Or rather, the explanations I arrive at never really seem to encompass totally the experience of pulling one life from another life, especially from nowhere, the way it feels so equally the right thing and the wrong thing all at once. The parting feels impossible, I think, and even permanent, because, being necessary and simultaneously not so, or, at least necessary and undesired, it approaches a place of indeterminacy where, ultimately, it approaches nothing. And maybe this, this absence at the end of what I’ve worked and struggled for with so many people and for so much of my adult life, this work that is the work of love and the failure of love, maybe this is what is accurate and true, the thing that makes us human, here in the wake of our departures. I can't be certain if this is right or not, but if it is, or even if it only partially is, what can I say to her, to anyone, to make the parting worth it? How do she and I continue trying in a world where that which waits for us is not what we were trying for? Maybe that is the work of poetry, to fail sometimes and fall a little short, to continue trying to remember and to write it down when there doesn't seem a reason to, perhaps precisely because there doesn't seem a reason; and in that open space carved out by language and by thought, the music exactly there.

And so it now begins

After a relatively harrowing farewell in the Twin Cities, I sheepishly met Kelli at the airport, guilty as I was for the lateness of the previous night's duration and for the utter poverty of my condition as a travel partner. Yet again my friends, it seems, had had their way with me, keeping me awake till five in the morning and as far from sobriety as possible on a night defined primarily by celebration and departure. For better and for worse, this is an aspect of my relationship to the people I love over which I apparently lack all control, even at the age of thirty one, and which Kelli, thankfully, not only understands and is empathetic towards as a matter of her own kind character, but, given her people and her relationships with them, she knows because she's been there, maybe even more than I have. "I'm proud of you," she said, smiling as I sat down in the seat next to her. "Don't be," I replied. "Totally proud," she said. Around us, the airport filled with the sound of people dragging luggage on linoleum and news on the television of a hurricane in New York. My head hurt and I was tired. "Thanks," I said, closing my eyes. I am traveling with the right person.

In Seattle we parted ways, but only for awhile. Kelli is meeting a friend, going north to Bellingham for a wedding, then south to Portland where her brother and his wife are about to have a baby. We dropped her off on the corner of a street downtown lined by people, mostly men, in strange costumes. PAX, the largest gaming festival in the nation, if not the world, is being held this weekend. Last I saw of Kelli, she was disappearing with a green backpack over her shoulder into a sea of elves and wizards. In ten days we'll reconvene with Riley and the three of us will board a plane to Bangkok. Jesus.

That evening I walked through the streets and neighborhoods of Seattle with my ex-girlfriend Jane. It was strange to see her and it was also not strange. We ate Pho on Broadway and got frozen yogurt in a Hello Kitty cup which we took to a bench in the park and ate together. A little girl in a big bike helmet scooted by on a wooden bicycle without pedals. The sun was beginning to go down. The girl got off her bike and started jumping, kicking her right leg back each time she left the ground. She spun around a bit, like there was music somewhere, though there wasn't. Her parents, a couple not much older than us, stood together watching, smiling. 

Later that night, after a couple drinks at a restaurant on 15th called Coastal Kitchen, Jane and I walked back to her apartment. In Seattle, the night was cool and every now and then, the scent of lavender, which seems to grow quite well here, hung in the air around us. Capitol Hill was empty and we had our arms around each other, a false couple, though not because of love. The love is there, as much as it ever was, which was a lot. The admiration, the respect, that's still there as well. A thousand other things. And although it felt right, authentic and familiar and real, it was also a little sad. I don't know how much we need each other anymore, at least not in the way we used to. Jane is in Seattle now. She belongs here. And she will do the good work that she has always done and that she has it in her to continue doing and that she was meant to do here, in Washington. If anything, I love Seattle because I believe that this is true and I look forward to seeing what she accomplishes, the kind of girl she eventually turns into. I, on the other hand, I am somewhere else entirely. And so it happens. And so it now begins.

The Call, the Echo, the Response

Part of writing is the struggle to believe in what you write. That is the blessing and the pressure and the curse. Often times, too often, a writer is better at writing than living up to what they've written. I fear this terribly, at all times. I told someone once they were a better poet than a friend, which is, perhaps, the cruelest thing I've ever said. Granted, at the time, the circumstances required a certain severity and coldness, but still. I am guilty of almost every accusation I've ever placed upon a person, especially when it comes to poetry. The self that one prepares in a poem, the speaker that both is and is not the "I" that is the poet, to whom or what is that accountable? If writing is incapable of saving us from each other and from ourselves, of creating action and tangibility, what can? What ever weight is great or terrible in us, may we, at the very least, place it in the center of the word. And the word, then, if it is true that language is, as Oppen claims it is, the creative act by which we are alive, may we proceed to the best of our abilities and with all the grace of the tradition, and with the urgency of needing to be human, and with the human need for meaning in a world where meaning is not a given but an act of making and of faith, to place it safely in the center of ourselves.

Here, in this, the Light in which we are

Three days left in Wisconsin, a span just long enough to pause for a moment and look, while I still can, at where I am, at who and what’s around me. Other than a few small errands and a carry-on to finish packing, this, if anything, is the only task that’s left for me to do before I leave, and while I’d like to think I’m always doing this, this noticing, at least to some extent, I’m not. Like everyone else I know, I too am easily and overly caught up, too distracted and entertained to pay attention to what matters and makes sense to me. This specific summer, though, feels different, as if the looking has been made easier somehow by the fact of my departure and by the time I’ve spent with both the people I’ll be leaving and the people I'll be leaving with. Kelli, a relatively new friend who I've known for the last three years as the pretty girl from Racy's who serves me coffee and has strange eyes, and Riley, an older friend I've known since I was sixteen and whose eyes are also strange, though in a sleepier way, will be joining me, at least at first, in Thailand. That their lives have somehow and out of nowhere lined up rather nicely with my own is, well, it’s everything. I’ve spent a lot of this summer wondering what the hell I ever did to deserve the place in which I find myself, right here, right now, as the trip gets closer by the hour, more tangible, more real.

Another  friend of mine, who I went to school with and who is now a farrier in Colorado, told me once when I asked him why he decided to spend two years studying poetry that he wanted, in the end, to be a better person. I used to tell my students this in Iowa, though I doubt they understood it beyond an inclination that somehow poets are supposed to be more sensitive than other people, which, of course, really isn’t true. What is true, or at least it is true for me, is that the act of sitting down to write is an act, ultimately, of opportunity, a chance to gather yourself together and pay attention. In the experience of the poem one looks harder at oneself and things and others than one might otherwise be inclined at some less focused moment in one’s life, gazing instead of glancing. My friend and mentor, the poet Joanna Klink who has taught me almost everything I know and whose book Circadian is never far away, writes that she would like to place herself “in a field of deep attention, and out of that attention come to feel and regard with more acute understanding what is there.” For her, and for many of us who believe that poetry makes us better people, the focus it takes to read a poem, and to write one, is precisely the focus it takes to be fully in the world. My faith is that once there, one reacts with greater curiosity to the mystery of other lives, with empathy, and that in doing so, it increasingly becomes possible to love and feel alive. This summer has been both these things, in spades.

Yesterday, Kelli and I went driving through Wisconsin, south on highway 27 then east on 10 to Granton, a village of about 500 where she grew up, in order to say goodbye to her parents and drop off some boxes at their house in the country. The sky that afternoon was a blur of clouds and the thinnest sunlight through the windshield, rain and not rain, a cast of grays and shadow-blues too numerous to name. We drove on blacktop and then, when the blacktop ended, we drove on gravel. We listened to a lot of bad music from the radio. Every now and then, if it was a band we used to listen to (Alice in Chains for Kelli, anything off Pearl Jam’s Ten for me) we sang. Mostly though, we watched the farms and fields go by, the cattle almost motionless but for the fact that we were moving at such relative velocity, talking in her car. We stopped for a while at her uncle’s farm where her grandmother lives in a small trailer parked in the side yard of the farmhouse. I met her mother and her uncle and her cousins. I listened to them talking and the easy ways they always seemed to find to laugh, even when the talking turned to those who were either dead or dying, or who had lost their fingers in a combine, or the cat which, sadly, caught itself in a fan in the barn and rotted. Not two days ago, a neighbor even accidentally shot himself while chopping wood in an adjacent field just down the road. Her cousin showed us a picture of a stream, and later we went wading through the brambles beneath the bridge she took it from. We sat on its bank beneath a tree and watched the raindrops sparkle in the still water, little jewels aloft above the silt-bed, and the light in which we were. We imagined going fishing.

Lately, it’s just kind of been like this, not just with Kelli, but with almost everyone. In Wisconsin, all is well. This is the feeling that’s taken over. All is well. And even though I’m scared, and even though I’m sad, I’m not sure how I ended up like this, what tiny god I prayed to or what selfless deed I did however long ago that just this summer is coming back. There were years, entire years, in which these last few months would have felt impossible. But I left those years. People and places helped me. Poems helped me. I am going somewhere else.

For Here There Is No Place That Does Not See You

In just under two weeks now I begin my exodus from the Middle West, a fact which has risen slowly from my periphery and finally fallen center. At the end of August I leave for Seattle. There I’ll spend ten days trying to say goodbye to a girl I know and care about, and who, in all likelihood, is the only reason I even have this opportunity in the first place. It won’t be easy. In fact, I’m terrified. The question of how to honor a connection to another person and how, at the same time, to gracefully defect, is, at least by my lights, without an easy answer. Nor should it be. Assuming you were ever present and a part of the relationship enough to know and need it, assuming you were fully there, the problem is one of wanting what you also want or have to walk away from. Similarly, this summer, and in the last two months especially, I’ve been thinking a lot about Wisconsin, what it means to have to leave again the place that I was born and raised in, and why I’m troubled by it in the way I am. Yet, through no fault of the place itself, or of its people, especially its people, I am, for the most part, already absent from my locality. Somewhere in the interior, the season’s changed already. I’ve stopped investing sentiment. My mind is full of fall.

Currently, what confuses me the most is how incredibly not better it’s gotten to feel like this. I’ve come and gone from women and from friends so often now, and from so many close locations, leaving should be easy. You’d think at this point I’d have an outline or a map, a field guide, that at the last right moment, any moment now, some distant instinct would take over, some hidden course of action buried deeply in the collective memory of my departures, a truth to guide my movements and my thoughts, yet none appears. There is not an inner hand, no far off point of brightness on the horizon. If I am honest with myself, which I try to be, there is a part of me that wants to simply slip away, move quickly out the door when no one’s watching, steal off into the night, stay lonely.

Flight, of course, is not an option. Though I think my friends would understand, both Jane and my family would disown me, and I don’t want to hurt anyone, especially them. Plus, there are still things I want to do before I leave, a shamelessly nostalgic list I keep in the back of my head of things I imagine I’ll miss when I get to Thailand. There is an old wooden ski jump, for example, just out of town that I used to go with girls to when I was still in High School, a place above the countryside where two people could sit and watch the night come down across Wisconsin like veil. The last time I stood up there was, strangely, one of the last times that me and my four closest friends were all together in the same place. Mostly we drank beer, smoked cigarettes, and expressed as best we could the boyish sentiment we felt between us, a bond unique to men in their early twenties before they’ve fully gone out into the world and felt firsthand the weight of it. It kind of breaks my heart a bit to think we’ve never managed to be together since then, but these things happen. A lot of things happen. I’m not sure why, but this summer I’ve felt the need to be there, to walk the wooden steps at night and stand atop the ski jump staring at the fields.

There are the things I’d like to do before I go, and then there are the things I find that I am doing. An action that seems to help right now is going to the gym. While this lacks, I realize, the romance of a pilgrimage to a distant vantage point above the fields and forests of the place where you were young, I’ve found myself at Gold’s Gym nearly every day since first I came home and then discovered I got a Fulbright and would have to soon be leaving. I like that I get to spend time with my friend Jacy when I go there, the fact that we get to grunt and groan together in the sterile light. I also like the attractive, dark haired, incredibly ripped girl who puts up twice the weight that I do, the hot pink tightness of her shirt. I like the sauna and the hot tub and the pool, the big red rubber balls I roll around on doing sit-ups. Mostly, though, it’s the fact that I know if I work hard enough, push further on the elliptical or add an extra twenty pounds of weight onto the bar, I won’t, for a moment, be required to think of anything except the fact my body is about to break. This, ultimately, is a space of refuge, emotionally and spiritually. Left to my own devices, I’d find a way to fret awake all night, thinking of girls and homes and how to leave them. I’d grind my teeth while sleeping.

Lately, as I'm prone to do in moments of uncertainty, I’ve also returned to reading Rilke. “Letters to a Young Poet” is a book I read when I don’t know who or what else to turn to. I read it about once a year, I have at least three or four copies, and I give it to everyone I care about who hasn’t already read it. In one of the letters, Rilke advices the young poet to “…love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away…and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast. And if what is near you is far away, then your vastness is already among the stars and is very great...It is good that you will soon be entering a profession that will make you independent and will put you completely on your own…” The reason I turn to him, I think, is obvious. As it is again in this, my favorite of his poems:

            ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO

                                   

            We cannot know his legendary head
            with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
            is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
            like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

            gleams in all its power. Otherwise
            the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
            a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
            to that dark center where procreation flared.

            Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
            beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
            and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

            would not, from all the borders of itself,
            burst like a star: for here there is no place
            that does not see you. You must change your life.

Here, in the place that sees the seer, the poet, staring attentively at the mutilated statue of the sun god, imagines the absent head to be looking down upon the god’s own body, causing it to appear “suffused with brilliance from the inside,” an act of self-reflection so completely powerful it creates not only light in a place bereft of light, but also, the seeing of the self lends credence to Apollo’s name and gives it substance, even immortality. Rilke’s faith is that the self, especially a secluded self, is lit ultimately by the act of attention. I appreciate especially that he conceives of attention not only as an act of creativity and power, but as a place in and of itself, a locality that causes one to see one’s self anew and reinvent the borders of who and where one is, of what one is capable of being in a world of flux and endless possibility. For me, at this point in my life, I need to believe that I am capable of something else, some distant place, of new relationships, some person other than I am. At the end of the poem, Rilke’s imperative to change, while seemingly out of nowhere, is also at the heart of my anxieties as a human being upon the brink of a change I know is coming, but how, and in what form? What will I leave behind me? Who will I turn into? Strange as it is, it's a feeling I've had before. I'll probably always have it.

DEPARTURE (THE WAY A NAME DISSOLVES)

1.)

It’s almost three o’clock and I am sitting

on the porch steps emptying

the gravel from my boots.

Middlewestern. And the farm dog panting in the shadow

of an oak tree on the lawn.

In the middle of the afternoon I shake

the soil out into the soil

and it’s the place I come from

when there are no more paths to cut

into the garden through the dandelions

or stones to scatter

on the driveway. Dead weeds drying

darker in the heat. There are letters we should have sent

and this is one of them. Strange

how we apologize in postcards

from an island, 

or that the photographs of cities

you have lived in

lined against the wall

can look you in the eye until you close

completely. In a house where you are wintered.

That late summer on the porch steps

I understood September by its reddening.

The fields had finished. The garden

no longer capable,

straw covered. I should have called and told you that

it doesn’t matter much the weather

we are reaching in. This winter

if we can keep the sunlight on the hoarfrost.

If it is possible. The branches of the burr oak

brightened and bent down.

2.)

That one could live like this, gleaning

barley from an acre’s edge or waking up

too early, falling back

asleep. We could gather fragments

in our hands, say the garden has endured.

Let us. Promise

to be good. We’re finally feeling older.

And this too is another way

to say your face is partially shadowed

in the porch light. Where the early fern

is curling. The quiet after church bells

where it is possible

to listen. Look,

it’s the middle of the afternoon

and I have no idea at all

if we will make it. Even as it rains

when I am walking in a clearing

that doesn’t need

the water. Or if the day is going out

and the axe I use

to split the pine in half is not

the axe my father left behind him

leaning on the wall.

By the time you get here the furrows will have flooded

and I cannot remember

the feeling of having ever scattered

in the first place, in the violence we are planting.

3.)

It’s almost midnight

and the driveway hasn’t darkened yet.

The wind is dripping. I’ve had to kill the basil.

At the edges of the yard

the window glow turns black

against the fence line

and continues. Almost midnight

when the crickets finish

ticking. The kind of shadow

green you’d cover clover

to keep the weeds from breathing.

In the piece of sky between the pines

the sound a day dissolves is not a quiet

I can accept without the map

I’ve made of how the beds were ordered

to know the groundwork strong.

Soon the whitetails will be starving.

A cold October circling

the days it takes to leave a home 

when I have written down from memory

the names of streets 

I’d like to live

and a wooden walking bridge above a river

in Wisconsin. There are no more towns I want

to drive alone to. There are no more towns.

It’s getting easier to say it

before I go into my house

where the weather I cannot forget

is happening. Because we close

into our rooms

our rooms return us

to the window. We close again

and the garden grows into the forest

and I am not afraid.

          

Of electric lights, a city / Dear, Minneapolis

Roughly an hour and twenty minutes from where I grew up, Minneapolis, MN was the first real city in my life. I say “real,” of course, suggesting, falsely, that the population of a place and the integrity of its placeness are somehow intrinsically related, as though mere mass equated substance. While I realize that it doesn’t, it does, when speaking of cities and my tumultuous relationship with them, seem, at the very least, a subjectively sound description of my experiences. I also say “real” implying that one can in fact meaningfully enter into an actual relationship with a city, that the streets, clubs, neighborhoods, cultures and sub-cultures define together a certain, almost human personality, a living energy at once directly present and impossible to name. Though I have lived in many other places, in many ways, for better and for worse, Minneapolis is the only sizable city in my life that matters. I love her very much, though I doubt I could ever live there.

Driving west on I-94, I first traveled to the Twin Cities as a teenager to see the band Mr. Bungle at First Avenue. While the show itself remains, fondly, a blur of distant, half-developed images, a loose and unclear memory consisting mostly of the amalgamated bodies of other people, a sweaty and thriving organism, it, as a point of original relation, seems particularly apt for at least two reasons. The first is that Minneapolis is absolutely inseparable from my experience of music, especially live music, and of a way of living which seems so often to accompany both the creation and consumption of that music. Secondly, when in a city for any real amount of time, I am simultaneously taken up by a feeling of liberating anonymity and paralyzing isolation. The mass presence of other people, especially urban people whose lives are influenced, to a large extent, by the pace of the city as a whole, not only draws me in upon myself, but their persistent being there in such force also pulls me out. A sea of living streets and buildings, the city washes me away.

In the mid to late nineties, for a period of about three years, my experience of Minneapolis was almost exclusively defined by record trips to Extreme Noise to buy patches, studs, and the latest hardcore album. Then, depending on who was playing, though it rarely mattered, my friends and I would burrow our skinny teenage bodies into the Bomb Shelter, a small, unventilated basement venue which quickly became the context and locality of those formative years as a young punk-rocker in Middle-West. Though eventually I would come to love the place and call it home, the first time there my friends and I walked in and immediately felt uneasy. The Twin Cities hardcore scene at that specific time was, perhaps, arguably the most productive and thriving punk scene in the country, though I couldn’t prove that. Centered around Extreme Noise, a volunteer-run, cooperative record store now located on West Lake, the anarco-punk collective Profane Existence, the nation’s largest distributor of hardcore music and literature, and the creative efforts of a rotating cast of degenerate musicians including the likes of Civil Disobedience, Code 13, Misery, State of Fear, and Man Afraid, the scene in Minneapolis was the home of almost every band I listened to. But being there for the first time, in the place where these bands actually played and whose members were likely standing in the room beside us, this was a vastly different experience then putting on a seven inch and listening with headphones in my bedroom at my parent’s house. Strangely, I felt incredibly self-conscious, more so even then when standing in the hallways of Memorial High School where I stood out utterly among the throng of kids in designer jeans and t-shirts. But in Minneapolis, at the Bomb Shelter, we simply weren’t punk enough. Our clothes lacked the distinctive grime and actual tatter of the locals. We were too clean, too sober, too still going to High School and living at our parent’s houses to blend in, too bright and wide-eyed and not on heroin to hide the fact that we were different. The worst thing that one could be at that age was a “poser,” someone who looked the part but couldn’t play it. I remember standing around for a while, awkwardly looking at people, the people looking back. One girl I remember in particular, the blaring shortness of her skirt. She had this kind of patched together leopard print tube top on, and when she caught me staring at her, she flipped me off and snarled. In the underbelly of the city, the room was bleakly concrete, dimly lit. The air, stale, tasted like a rancid mix of body sweat and Grain Belt. When I walked out, I found my friend Josh in an alley down the block, his t-shirt turned inside out, rubbing dirt and toothpaste in his hair.

Though I have continued coming back to Minneapolis, my relationship to the Bomb Shelter, and to the scene in general, exploded beyond repair on a violent summer night, July if I remember right, 1997. I’ve never been quite sure of the details. In the aftermath of the Minneapolis riots, everything I’ve read has happened at a slant. There is a tendency, I think, and an understandable one, especially on the part of the oppressed, to romanticize this specific kind of violence as a means of making sense of it, to paint those who were beaten, pepper sprayed, and jailed as purely innocent, victims of police barbarity, martyrs of the cause. While this is true, it is not the only thing that’s true. What is inextricably true and what I do remember is the heat. When magnified by the warmth of bodies packed together in a room without access to the outside air, the temperature must have made us angry. The penultimate band had finished. People were pouring up the stairs and into the street to cool their bodies down and breathe. I don’t remember how it started, or who started it, but a fight broke out. This, sadly, was becoming increasingly common. Of all the fights I’ve been in in my life, all but one of them has happened at a punk show. I don’t know why this is the case, or what could have been done to make it less so. The anger which united us and which gave weight and credence to the idea of punk also turned us in upon ourselves. Like most things, our weakness was our strength.

That night, when people started, yet again, to rip and tear at each other, the only thing to do was try to stop them, which is what we did. Specifically, I remember a guy trying to pull a girl off another guy. She had his dreadlocks in her hands and she was yanking, hard, with everything she had. Then someone started hitting him. In the intense frenzy of the moment, without the time to talk or consider what actually is going on, one person’s attempt to stop a fight looks, to another person, a lot like the fight itself. Despite their good intentions, a person tries to put an end to violence and becomes it. In no time at all the sidewalk, and then the street itself, filled with about twenty drunk, sweaty, and extremely angry people, screaming, punching, and kicking at each other. Bottles broke and blood was drawn. Unsurprisingly, someone called the cops.

I’m not sure exactly what stopped the altercation. Maybe everyone just got tired. In hindsight, it was probably because Defiance started playing. Either way, when the cops finally got there, all three hundred or so of us were off the street and in the basement of the Bomb Shelter. I was standing in the back when the first officers arrived, guns drawn, and started pushing through the crowd. Though I couldn’t hear anything over the roar of the band, I could tell, by the expressions on the faces of both the officer and the kid being questioned next to me, that whatever their conversation was, it wasn’t friendly. Soon a small crowd assembled. Soon the kid got struck across the face, hard. We pounced before his body hit the ground, almost as though we’d been waiting for it, as though a part of us wanted it to happen.

From that point on, the night became a fog, a blur of lights and largely disconnected images. I remember waking up to the fact I had climbed onto the back of another person, much larger than me, that I had my arm around the person’s neck and I was squeezing. When I realized the person was a policeman, it was too late. I had committed, on instinct and without thinking, to a course of action over which I no longer had control. Then the world went black. When I woke up again, it was on the ground to the sharp sting of pepper spray. Someone grabbed me, my friend Jake, I think, and carried me, quickly, up the stairs and into the street. There, the street was filled with cop cars. It was filled with lights and sirens, men with shields and helmets. It was filled with people, blind and running, with people throwing rocks, bottles, whatever objects happened to be at hand. Anyone who wasn’t in a uniform was being sprayed, beaten, and arrested. We got the hell out of there, fast.

When I finally stopped crying, I was on the front lawn of a hospital sitting in the spray of a sprinkler. My friends were with me. We had managed, somehow, to find each other. Though the hospital refused to treat us, we were, for the most part, safe and un-arrested. At seventeen, this was suddenly the only thing I’d ever seen and been a part of that mattered. With the initial rush beginning to subside, with the burning in my eyes and the pain in the back of my head beginning to subside, I began to anticipate going back to Eau Claire and telling people what we’d done. The question of my authenticity as a kid who looked and dressed the way I did, who listened to the music and held the political views I did, was no longer on the table.  I fought a cop and got my ass kicked. Finally, I was punk enough.

Looking back, that moment in Minneapolis was also the beginning of the end of my affiliation with the people and politics of that specific place, a part of the world which made me passionate and feel alive because it taught me how to hate. This is not to say that the punk scene didn’t encourage us to care about each other, that it didn’t breed a sense of community or fuel the more creative aspects of our nature, it did, but I spent so much time as a teenager trying to not be like my parents or the guy in a plaid shirt in line at the post office, the woman pushing a cart of food and plastic products through a Wal-Mart, that I was unable, for a good portion of my life, to pay attention to and credit fully the things which made us similar. I’m not sure exactly when or why I started drifting away from punk rock, probably because I started smoking pot and fell in love, but it happened. I got sick of seeing fights. And I’m glad it happened. I needed it to.

At this point in my life, I can’t speak to the quality of punk in Minneapolis, or anywhere else for that matter. I’ve been gone too long, both from the place itself and from the scene in general, from any scene in general. Plus, I don’t listen to the music, though I’ve heard the musicianship has gotten better, which is good. One could make an argument, I suppose, that I’ve sold out, gotten older, and given up. And while I wouldn’t want to take that away from them, I tend to credit the changes I’ve gone through more as a matter of clarity than anything, an attempt to feel at home in my own real skin and not the costume of an idea whose parameters, ultimately, have proven incredibly isolating and restrictive.  The question of whether punk is dead or not just doesn’t seem important. These days, when I visit the Cities, it’s to see the people that matter most to me, most of whom are playing music there, constructing a new scene from the remnants of the old. We’ll go to shows sometimes and dance. We’ll stand outside the bar, talking, and the lights of Minneapolis. Every now and then a person walks by who looks the way that I did when I used to think it mattered that I look like that, and I'll wonder what he thinks of when he sees me, if he thinks I'm just another asshole, some person drinking beer outside a bar, which is exactly what I am.  

Franklin Fox Hogseth (Aug 7th, 2011)

Beginning in my mid-twenties, I started having friends with babies, which was fine. Granted, I don't particularly like babies. They're never really quite as cute as people say they are. Plus, they tend to take my friends away from me, which, I guess,  is understandable. Objectively, I am, arguably, less in need of their attention. I can feed myself. I can refrain from shitting in my own pants. I don't drool. The list goes on. That being said, I've never really been excited for a kid before. Or at least I've never been excited in the way that other people seem to get when their friends have kids. For me, their birth marks not only the beginning of a new life, but it also, sadly, signifies the end of something, a place and point in time we can't return to.

Lately, that's been changing. Part of it, I think, is that I'm simply starting to get used to it. Though I often act like a child, I'm finally feeling comfortable being the age I am, sort of, and children kind of come with the territory. So be it. Another part, and this, perhaps even  more so, is that the kids are happening closer and closer to home. Whereas their lives have, in the past, occurred primarily in my periphery, gurgling and crying from a relatively safe distance on the outskirts of my circle of acquaintances, a child has, just yesterday, finally arrived full center in the middle of my life.

There are friends, and there are friends you make into your family. I've known Bill since I was thirteen, Crystal since I was twenty two. Notwithstanding a couple years of self-indulgent stubbornness on my part, the three of us, in some form or another, have been bound by more than a general admiration for each other and an ability to have fun. For me, I am drawn to Bill and Crystal because I respect them. They live the way that people ought to live, simply, generously, and in immediate contact with both their social and ecological communities, which is not an easy task, but perhaps it is the only one. Every time I visit them at their home, a renovated Church tucked neatly into the rural Wisconsin countryside, when I watch Bill followed by his old dog across the yard, Crystal kneeling in the garden in the back ground pulling nettle, I am reminded not only of where I am, but where I'm coming from, the mid-sized cities of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Montana where I have lived and gone to school and written for the last ten years or so, sustaining myself, but only barely. In large part because of Crystal, Bill, maybe more than any of my other friends, is more directly rooted in his small portion of the world, committed deeply to and actively engaged in the place where Franklin Fox, their newborn baby boy, will ultimately grow up. I mention this in contrast to myself and to the majority of my closest friends because I, unlike Bill, am not committed anywhere, to anything outside myself and my obsessions as a writer. Something tells me that to be a father, or at least a good one, you have to be willing to give up a portion of yourself for the sake of the son or daughter. I have no doubts that Bill will be able to do this, nor do I that Crystal will guide the both of them with the intelligence and grace she so readily possesses. And I am incredibly excited about this. The first thing I did this morning when I found out that Frank was fine and healthy was grab my phone. I just wanted to tell somebody, to share the fact that I was happy. Then I sat down to write this. I feel lucky that Franklin came a little early and I get to meet him before I go. I look forward to being in his life, to see him turn into a person. And for him to be in my life, maybe I need that also. Actually, I'm sure of it.   

A Letter to Bill Hogseth from Ellensworth, WA (Summer, 2005 / or, the day the bus broke down)

Dear Bill, 

It isn't even raining. There was water about an hour ago, on the other side of the mountains, but even that was insignificant, something you could walk around in with no umbrella and be fine. They've stopped the bus because one of the windshield wipers doesn't move too good across the glass. Protocol. This is shit. I have a strong suspicion the driver is lying. Its two a.m. and this early morning without rain they've pulled into one of those half-gas station / half- fast food restaurants that line the long black highways of America. Here you can consume meat and petroleum in one foul swoop, buy cigarettes and smoke them in the cold. I'm sitting at a Subway drinking coffee. The coffee's bad. I'm not even sure where I am. Ellensworth, Ellingsworth, Ellensburg? Does it matter? I'm in Washington and Washington is not my home. My minds not right at this awkward hour of the night. My body is revolting. The left leg numb about the thigh, a wicked twist still twisting in the neck. Also, everywhere I look there's mutants doing things in packs. Where do these people come from? No wonder Americans are hated. If I listen close enough I will know exactly the kind of engine it takes to make a car hit sixty in under 5.2, which, if the rumors are true, is pretty hard to beat. Only American cars can do this. The Japanese make crappy cars, apparently. An unfortunate looking fellow with an English accent tries to make a case for the fast machines of Europe, but he is quickly laughed into silence by the rest of us who've been chain-smoking outside the gas station for over an hour now. Holy shit can these mutants smoke! There's one with a gimpy left hand who takes down three each time the bus pulls over to let us stretch our legs. He's a killer for sure. Can't even look him in the eyes. Luckily, I'm wearing a Guns- N-Roses shirt and a hat with an elk on there that says Montana. If I stick to the shadows, talk bad about the gays, and spit a lot, maybe they'll forgive me for my skin. I would give anything to have you here right now. Its only a matter of time before the mutants discover I'm a poet and tear me into pieces.

* * *

We'll I'll be damned if Dolly Parton didn't just come on the radio with a song I know the words to! The mutants are in an uproar when they realize the skinny Asian kid likes Dolly Parton, and we all agree, it's unanimous, Dolly Parton is one hell of a fine looking woman. Unfortunately, Ms. Parton has yet to write a song longer than five minutes and soon the song is over. Now some inbred beef eater is singing about the USA. The conversation about women's body parts, however, continues unabated and soon the mutants are comparing "bus-slut" stories from various trips across the country, exaggerated, and in all likelihood, completely fabricated narratives that have managed, somehow, to live on in the surprisingly precise collective mutant memory. I will spare you the details, most of which  involve a bathroom stall, but what I must explain is the surreal extent to which I can't believe I'm here, listening to stories I can't believe have happened in the same world I walk around and go to school in. But this is Ellensworth at three a.m. Time is passed in anyway it can be. Round here the night continues on.

* * *

I wish that I were home right now and I could write you a real letter with my small orange cat sleeping on my lap. If I were home I'd tell you about my tiny Montanan life and the shitty job I work five days a week while trying to pass a Spanish class I need to graduate that I am currently not passing. I would tell you that I'm happy here but lonely and that I miss you and I wonder how you are. When I'm home I mostly go to school and then to work and then home again where I do homework until midnight. Then I try to sleep, but so often I can't sleep, and so I end up writing poems or else letters to a girl in Germany I met on Ko Chang Island after New Years when I was visiting the motherland. Funny how much easier it is to talk to girls in letters when you don't have to look at them and think they're pretty. Every now and then, however, the gods look down and smile. I imagine, were I in Montana and not sitting in a Subway sandwich shop at this godforsaken hour, I would find myself writing you about a girl I've met here in Missoula. She's far too young for me, but I feel like I'm a boy again, anxious and always wondering what she's doing, what she's thinking, which doesn't happen much these days. For the most part I am discouragingly asexual. Every now and then, however, I'll see a girl so dark I have to know her name and have her, or at the very least, imagine that I do. She is one of these. We read the obituaries together on Sunday afternoons and make up stories of the dead.  We do crossword puzzles and never finish them. She reads me Hamlet, which she is studying for an English class, and I lay on the ground and let the room fill up. She's even ruined tap-shoes dancing in the snow! Christ. She's only twenty. What have I become? I have a strong suspicion age is a mutation. Soon I'll be one of these sketchy old men so lonely they ride the bus in search of love, away from nothing toward something even less. Bill, you've got to promise me, if you've ever loved me, if you see this happening, put me down before I'm forty. I mean this. I am far too weak for suicide.

* * *

Suddenly there is commotion and a mass migration out the Subway doors. Our new bus has arrived! Its pulling up right now! The mutants are surrounding it. I can tell they're excited and making noises because their mouths are opening and closing like forty small black holes, tiny puffs of steam escaping through the night air. I will have to finish this letter somewhere else.

* * *

Really? You have got to be kidding me. That bus was not our replacement bus, rather it is a bus going back the direction I just came from. It is the anti-replacement bus. This is shit. Now the mutants from the anti-bus are filtering into my tiny half-a-Subway and are mingling with the mutants from my bus. Twice as many mutants and the mutants all agree. Its unanimous. It sucks our bus broke down. Two mutants to my left are plotting mutiny against Greyhound proper. Apparently, Greyhound proper is run by Jews and/or gays. We want our money back. We also want hotels with cable television. We want beer. Women. We want our homes again. Mine is in Montana. Montana is far away.

* * *



Now there is laughter all around. A tiny mouse of a girl declares it seems her cat has sprayed her binder. The mutants take turns sniffing it. Its unanimous. Cats spraying things is funny, as long as the things belong to others. Now we are talking cats:

"Cats are good hunters."

"I like hunting."

"My cat killed a mole"

"I like hunting."

Now we are talking hunting. Guns. The death of things in general. I am finding it hard to continue this letter without more coffee. A particularly twitchy mutant informs me I look like I could use some meth. Laughter all around. In the Subway-Gas Station at 4:30 in the morning we all agree that meth is fun at first, but arguably a poor decision.

"Bad for the teeth," says one mutant.

"I've got scars," says another.

Its true, he does have scars. He shows us. Now someone shows him her scars. We're in Ellensworth showing each other our scars, speaking of our wounds. Mutant with the most wounds wins. I have only one scar from my belt buckle two Christmases ago when I was fat. This is nothing. Gimpy left handed mutant declares his hand is gimpy from beating up a guy who tried to kiss him, a decision which landed him in prison. Recovering-meth-mutant has a scar clear across his face from being jumped in Tacoma by a pack of juveniles, three scars on his arms from a guy who fought like a girl and started scratching, and, the topper, a gash across his back beginning at the left hip and arching up to just below the right shoulder. A knife tattoo he calls it. We have a winner! He is incredible! The mutants all agree. This kid is a survivor. Shouts and high fives all around the room. A sudden and glorious camaraderie becomes us. The night is new again.

* * *


Finally there is silence. Only me and the freckled, brown haired girl behind the sandwich counter, poor thing, fingering the pickles. One of the mutants has pot and they are all now outside getting stoned behind a dumpster, while I, the quiet Asian kid writing a letter, has been placed in charge of all the mutant’s strange belongings. I wonder what’s in their bags. Probably clothes, same as mine.

* * * 



Now the police are here. I fear for my mutant brethren partaking of illicit substances somewhere out there in the shadows. Will the officer take us all away? No, Officer is hungry and wants a sandwich. The mutants, by now stoned enough to think the law is on their side, begin asking questions. Can he call the Greyhound office for us? Arrest the driver? The hungry officer has no answers. There is nothing anyone can do.

* * *


Sodomy. Decapitation. Rape. Now we’re talking history. The worst things that have happened to us. The worst things we’ve made happen onto others. Bill, these people live in a world I can not explain. Any words I’d use would fall out hallow from my mouth and shatter. I lack the ground of having lived these lives in which to root my speaking of these lives. What I can say is that they’ve lived a whole lot harder than I have, much much harder. I can give you facts, but that is all. I have nothing to compare. Three of us are felons. Two days ago, one of us watched our best friend gunned down and bleeding in the street. We are here because we’re running from our lives. The bigot with the gimpy hand was raised, molested, and gang-raped in group homes from the age of ten until eighteen. There’s a lot of talk of liquor and the fists of shitty father’s. There’s depression, gang fights, bar fights, jail cells, even a San Francisco rodeo and a bull hoof to the sternum. I have nothing to add  except that time at the Bomb Shelter in Minneapolis I tried to fight a cop and lost so bad Jake and Riley dragged me to a hospital which wouldn’t take me in. The mutants like this story very much, especially the part about being woken up off the concrete by a face full of pepper spray, but that was a secluded and singular event. I do not live my life this way, in such sudden and senseless violence. These men and women have and will most likely continue doing so. What do you say to a guy who watched a Samoan take the head off a Mexican and stuff the body in a drier when he was ten? What do you say when he looks you in the eyes and explains how the blood shot out in rhythm, spraying to the music of the heart until booth the blood and the heart itself ran out? These stories have no end. I can only take them down.

* * *

The boys are smoking again. I’ve got to hand it to them. These people get ground down from all directions and still manage to exist. Somehow, cigarettes allow this. So does hate. So does knowing there are others who have just as many scars, addictions, dead Mexicans in driers, and histories of gang rape as you do. Life is a beautiful democracy. It wears us all down equally. Richard Hugo said that. He said a lot of things and usually he was right. But there isn’t anything equal in any of this. These men and women have so little to do with me, and I with them, and yet somehow here we are, together in an Ellensworth Subway sandwich shop at five a.m. in the morning. Our exhaustion makes us same. What I’ve learned to love about the mutants is the specific knowledge that I’m afraid of them. Not in any physical sense, no, these mutants will not harm me, we are on and off this bus together, but there’s a fear of somehow being on this bus forever, of becoming so badly beaten by a life your only option is to accept it, to find a way to pass the time until the last bus pulls over and doesn’t start again. I’m afraid of what will happen if the poems aren’t good enough, if I don’t get into grad school, if I never have a book, a girl, the farm I’d like to die in when I’m old and in my sleep. Will I somehow end up in Ellensworth again? Will there be someone here to write my story down and find a way to see me as person? Bill, among these people I feel myself a fraud. I am so obviously weaker than they are, so completely untested in a world these people wear the scars of. I write and write and risk so little I'm ashamed. I'm from somewhere else, from poems and universities. 

* * *

Any moment now, the sun will come and take us all away. When it does, we’ll board the bus again, all of us, together. We’ll ride east in the early half of morning, the small towns blurring slowly in the window, the spotted fields of cattle, the solitary trees. Maybe I’ll fall asleep, but I doubt it. Soon the woman next to me will ask me for my shoulder. I’ll say certainly, of course. Bill, in Washington the light is warm and rising. The woman’s hair smells like a cigarette in a glass of water forgotten on the counter of a bar. Give my best to Crystal. This bus is full of names. 

                                                                                                   

- Nick