I believe in public libraries

the way I believe in public transport, and public healthcare. Which is why I love doing readings in libraries. The One City One Book Launch I did this afternoon, at Oakland's Main Library, was a perfect example. Around 50 people, with perhaps the widest diversity of age, ethnicity, background, of any group of that size I've ever performed for. People who walked in with no idea of what was going on - and stayed. No separation between performer and audience. Most importantly, it was absolutely free.

The extra bonus was the library laying on chai, samosas, parathas, naan and leeli chutney. I said to Punam, "I want all my readings in future to have chai and chaat!"

And it made me grin, wide, to see my chapbooks in the display case for the event. To know that my chapbooks are in Oakland's public libraries - and you can borrow them!

I'm missing

my friend Punam, who went back to London this afternoon.

Missing is a curious word. The very emotion of missing someone comes from them being with you, rather than missing - just not in the flesh. It's about presence. I miss people when they're present: in my thoughts, memories, feelings, dreams, imagination. When they stop occupying that space, I don't miss them any more.

I'm listening to Ugandan musician, Samite. His CD, Tunula Eno, is my comfort music. Dedicated to his wife, who died of brain cancer, each track resonates with poignant, large-hearted humanity.

Photo: D. Ross Cameron

best thing about ex-partners

is how you can expose your whiniest, most irritating, angst-ridden self, and they puncture it with mockery you'd never take from anyone else. Not to mention the strangely comforting surreal-idiot-babble you slip into with them. Babble that would have any other adult in your life looking at you strangely and backing slowly towards the door.

Such as:

"What do you do when you wake up scared?"

"I never wake up scared. You know why? My first thought when I wake up is Coffee. How can you be scared with coffee to look forward to?"

"OK, what do I do when I wake up scared? Other than coffee?"

"Scared like, the Martians are coming for you? Global warming's going to get you before you turn 40? What?"

"Scared like, what if my work never gets where I want it to, because I never get past item 5 on my To Do List? What if I wallow in mediocrity all my life because I'm not motivated enough? What if America's still giving $3bn a year to Israel when we're 80? What if the next global-warming hurricane wipes out Nairobi? What if the next 500 years is the Age of the Neocons and AIPAC, and everything we do is just an exercise in futility?"

"See, that's good. You're in the Van Gogh Suffering Artist phase of your career. Have you had urges to chop off fleshy appendages?"

"No."

"You need to ramp it up. Go to a Halloween shop and buy a box of fake ears. When you wake up scared, get out of bed, stick one on the side of your head, and lop it off with a butter knife."

Pause.

"Where exactly in your brain do you store these ideas?"

"Look, I offered you the simple solution. Coffee. People never trust the simple solution."

"Just once, I'd like to climb into your head and see how your synapses connect."

"My genius is unfathomable. Don't try to dissect it."

"This isn't the dumbest conversation we've ever had, but it's close."

"Clearly you've forgotten the one about the flatworms."

"Do not mention the flatworms. Or evolution. Or Lamarck, for that matter. And don't say...."

"Ontogeny...."

"NO! DON'T SAY IT!"

"Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny."

"God. You just had to say it, didn't you? Now I've gotta go stab something."

"You'd find me less brain-jangling if you drank more coffee."

"Huh?"

"Think about it."

"I don't want to think about it. Listen, I had a thought this morning."

"So did I. Coffee."

"No a real thought. Well, real in an existential kind of way. Do love poems stay true after the relationship ends? Like all the ones I wrote for you – are they still true, in some alternate dimension, even though we didn't last?”

“Is an ear still true after you lop it off the side of your head?”

“Fake ear or real ear?”

“If it’s a fake ear, it wasn’t true to start with. So you need to ask, were the poems like fake ears, or real ears? And were you Van Gogh when you wrote them, or some whiny scaredy-pants with no friends to go trick-and-treating at Halloween?”

"You are now officially making no sense whatsoever.”

“Hey, I’m not the one who began this conversation.”

a normal week in Palestine

Photo: IPC, 12/31/05. Unarmed Palestinians resist land grab by Israeli Occupation forces

Tonight, Punam and I danced at a farewell party for my friend Aryeh, who's going to El Salvador to continue her work as an educator-artist for global justice. Into my mind, as we talked about war, struggle, hope, came lines from the legendary Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish:

If you truly love me, place my dream
in my hands and say to the Son of Mary,
"Lord, how could you have made us endure what you endured yourself?
Will there be enough justice left over
for us to be just ourselves tomorrow?"

From: Night That Overflows My Body

So I took a quick look at the week just gone by in the Occupied Palestinian Territories:

* 5 Palestinians were killed by Israeli Occupation Forces.

* 29 Palestinian civilians, including 19 children, were wounded by IOF.

* IOF conducted 25 incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank.

* Houses were raided and 30 Palestinian civilians, including 9 children and a girl, were arrested by IOF.

* 7 houses and a shop were transformed by IOF into military sites.

* IOF shelled a civilian facility in Khan Yunis.

* IOF imposed severe restrictions on the movement of Palestinian civilians and election candidates in the West Bank; and IOF arrested 4 Palestinian civilians at checkpoints in the West Bank.

* IOF have continued to construct the Annexation Wall in the West Bank; IOF razed areas of Palestinian land near "Shavi Shomron" settlement, northwest of Nablus; and IOF uprooted 400 olive trees in Sikka village near Hebron.

* Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian civilians and property in Hebron; dozens of settlers moved back to the evacuated "Sanour" settlement in the north of the West Bank; and IOF demolished a house in Beit Hanina village near Jerusalem.

Israel has demanded $2.2 billion from the US in compensation for evacuating illegal settlements in the Gaza Strip. Our tax money. Anyone see any headlines about that?

If you come across some leftover justice, send it this way.

Tongue gym

Photo: David Huang

Say: red leather yellow leather red leather yellow leather red leather yellow leather

Say: toy boat toy boat toy boat toy boat

Relax the back of the tongue. Relax the throat. Feel the buzz, the vibration, in the upper face mask, against the hard palate. The muscle fibres in the tongue go in all directions; you need to work them out on a regular basis so they don't seize up on stage.

Now, forward placement. My mind is my own. Many men are making much money in the month of May.

Love your vowels. Vowels are the container of sound. No glottal frys - whoops - you did it again. Listen.

Too airy. Focus the sound. Like a laser. Extend between the hipbones and lower ribs.

Support your breath. Inhale. Flip the abdominals. One by two by three by four...your max is 16? You need to be able to go up to 32. Double your daily practice time.

Intention. Volume, resonance, sustained breath, all come from intention. Intention is the mover of movers. Don't tense the tongue. Don't squeeze the ribs. Loosen your neck. Work the abdominals. Down there, you can work like a dog, but everything above must be loose. Tension kills vibration.

You don't raise volume with the breath - you do it with buzz. Buzz beats breath.

OK. Body warmup - check. Face warmup - check. Neck, jaw, lips, tongue, soft palate - check. Vocal glides - check. Tongue twisters, vowel work, consonant work - check. Breath control - check.

Now, run Shilling Love. Focus, project, tone, placement, long torso, sustain the breath, sustain the breath, sustain the breath. Your goal is to take your vocal instrument from violin to double bass. Oops, glottal fry. Listen.

Two hours of voice coaching - and we've only just begun to work the piece.

here's what I love about blogging

It's amazing writing practice. Personal and informal enough to circumvent perfectionism: I'll blog in 2 minutes a piece that I would labor over for 2 days if it was going to be "published" or performed. Public enough to filter out narcissism, impose some quality control. My postings don't have to be my best writing, but they do have to be tight, coherent, relevant. It's impossible to blog without the underlying thought "And my point is?"

I said to my friend Lisa, one of the finest and funniest writers of my acquaintance, yesterday: "Blogging has got me writing better and faster than I ever have before."

the rains have failed again this year

in Kenya. Twice. The long rains were supposed to come from March to May, the short rains from October to November. My father said on the phone this morning: "Everything is so dry - another drought. Other parts of the world have more rain than they can cope with, and we don't have a drop. The food shortages are already beginning."

I could hear the rain drip off the gutters outside as he spoke. I could hear George Bush's 2001 speech, shortly after the US reneged on the Kyoto Protocol, refusing to acknowledge the US's role as the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases: "We do not know how much effect natural fluctuations may have had on global warming."

poem that cracks me up, every time

The hardest thing in the world to write - an ironic love poem, that pulls off self-mockery and mockery of the other, without descending into sarcasm. And still gives us a deeply satisfying ending - the intimation of private language, private laughter, betweeen two people, a joke that no one else can enter.

Litany
by Billy Collins

You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine...

- Jacques Crickillon

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley,
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I am not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and - somehow -
the wine.

new year's eve

I always miss people on New Year's Eve. It's an arbitrary fictional line in time. Time itself is a fictional construct with no real basis. Yet every New Year's Eve, waves of longing and loneliness surge through me. For people on other continents, people I've loved and lost, people who've died, people who are alive and only a few miles away, but I may never see again.

It always starts with the thought: Where was I last New Year's Eve? Who was I with?

Nairobi, London, Calgary, Berlin,
what city was that, what year?
What poem was I writing, what fear
did I tango with; face
did I search out
across that room, what shape
was that love?

So it was good tonight to be at a small party, with a group of close friends who know how it feels to have threads attached to your heart that tug across oceans, across mortality. To bask in the sanctuary of our shared art and histories, the ways we feed and nurture each other, make a haven for each others' dreams and hopes and heartbreaks.

It was Vivek's birthday. Shireen brought a cake from a Chinatown bakery that specializes in wedding cakes - extravagant white confection bejewelled with strawberries, kiwi and melon. Vivek and Philip told us how they met. Mamuka and Irma told us how they met. Vivek talked about the years of his and my friendship, the growth and change he's seen in me. Shireen and I got into a heated debate about art and commerce.

We didn't notice midnight coming until the noise began. Then we raced up the narrow staircase to the rooftop of Irma and Mamuka's building, for one of the best views in San Francisco of the fireworks. Punam, Shireen and I had our arms around each other; we all screamed spontaneously at the ones that ended in clouds of glitter.

Shireen said: "Why are we screaming?"
I said: "Because we want to be large enough to hold the beauty of them."

If every face my hand has cupped
on every continent could be condensed
into a single microchip, embedded
in the delta veins of my left
inner wrist, I’d raise it
to my mouth. Give thanks
for all that falls
but glittered before it fell
give thanks
for joy and pain
of growing larger.