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Monday, February 11, 2013

The Tour Begins


"So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable." Christopher Reeve


The Impossible Tour has gotten underway: I left Los Angeles today, heading north on the I-5, with Sheryl Crow and Pink as my soundtrack. I stopped at a rest stop to meditate and spent the middle meaty part of the 7 hour trip listening to Eckhart Tolle and Michael Beckwith talking about presence, living in the now, and evolving one's consciousness out of victimhood, or the need to tell a story and into awareness and beingness with the eternal. Then I switched back to some righteous superwoman lyrics by Pink...

Almost as soon as I left LA I began writing a poem about my niece and nephew, the twins I have been living and playing with for the last few months. These outspoken 8-year olds started asking me some important questions about my poetry career awhile ago when, much to their annoyance, I was going out almost every night to do a different gig. First Niko (the girl) asked me, when I was going to have my "last gig" (so that I could get back to the much more important task of spending evenings at home playing Bronco with them). When I replied, "hopefully never" she was not impressed.

Later, Malik (the boy), after viewing some of my videos and my website asked me if I talk about him and his sister at my gigs..and "do they even know that we exist??/!!!" I had to admit that no, my audiences generally do not know about them. They were disgusted with this unsatisfactory state of affairs and decided then that the solution was for me to write a poem about them.

But here is the thing about writing poems about people: it is generally easier to write about them when they are not around or when some time has passed since you have seen them. I don't know why this is. Is nostalgia a necessary ingredient for poetry? Maybe.

So don't you know, that as soon as  as I hit the wide open road I started to write about them:

Cherubs on their best days
Rugrats the remainder
Crawling chasing jumping yelling
Munchkins making merry...

Children are very good at keeping us in the now. We grownups would be so lost without them...