How could we have known what we had in the palm of our hands youth flowing like the springs of Dionysus and energy for days? Up at seven teach, talk, philosophize and across town traffic to an afternoon course at the university with read and talk and more philosophy and then maybe on to blake’s and beer and wine and into the wee hours of the dawn. Stumbling into frigid automobiles of trepidation through the blackened dying streets of a post-working class ghetto and maybe even towards a 7-11 if you get there before 2am they still might sell you a 40 as if that is what I needed. And I would stumble up my happy hill and into words and maybe morning back again to cycles and who has time to sleep at 23? I had a world to change. I had half-empty bottles to drain as I stared out from the foggy balcony and onto the bay already in fear of my dreams. Already aware of my responsibilities. Already intimate with words.

I knew and I planned an escape even as I perched within the four walls of knowledge pontificating paz y revoluccion to my young listeners together all of us trying to grow up in that town in that beautiful lovely bullet-ridden hell-hole of a home that I would gladly die for, but that would have been easier than the turn. My stomach always ready to explode with angst; the indecision. How could I not know that I was a writer? How could I not sneak out on BART lines under the water into the sea and on the other side with my notebook and anonymity finding a dark crevice and an outlet and the liquid druggings and the secret scrolls formed from the void in my own self-enforced exclusion?

Little did I know of my own impending implosion; little did I know of skin markings and promises to the night of snakes and arches and episodes of metamorphoses and sweaty sojourns over slopes and into the skin of the city; into the womb of art.

All of that all of me walking is just out of reach and good. If I didn’t guess I would have died of anticipation I would have jumped out of the oven undone I had years to simmer in the moratorium of me. There was work to do while I still had the energy and the patience.

I was swallowed in the stranglehold of hegemony and structural change.

I was still a believer on Sundays. I still whispered the verses in my sleep.

A year of percolation and a season of thought. I would soon exasperate the serpent would call the question and I would lay between two rivers contemplating the cross and the sword. I would waft into the mist before daybreak with a compass and a smile. But for the moment my bags were unpacked and my lesson plans were ready.