Feeling like this is the end of the road because this is the end of the tour. Now back home, of sorts. Home if you can call it home, the place where you sleep and eat and fuck and laugh and get mad and try to be a human person with a purpose in the world. All these strings attached to the concrete underneath your feet are holding you up, too. Pluck them and they make sounds, a melody that answers the beat pounded out by your tight sneakers, the percussion of four tires. Soon the ground will drop away all together and there will only be sky between you and the ocean. Until the ground. Thank you New York, Los Angeles, Saratoga Springs, Washington DC, Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts. You we

The picture above is a selection from a map showing the Republican results in the New York primary. The areas shown are the predominantly African-American neighborhoods of central Brooklyn. In many cases these districts tally just a handful of results. 4 votes for Trump, 2 for Kasich, 0 for Cruz. It is important to have this account. It is important to know that there are monsters where you live, and that you should beware of them. Ideas that live inside walls come creeping out to assert their existence during an election. The scariest thing for most of us is the kind of idea that exists contrary to what we think is a universal truth. There are hidden daggers behind doors, waiting for you t

Not an Elections Monster post. Tomorrow I will be in Washington DC performing a reading from The Voyager Record at Upshur Books at 6PM. Other readers will be Queen Mob's Teahouse editors Rion Amilcar Scott, Reb Livingston, and also Shaun Gannon. For more about this exciting literary event in our nation's capital, where all of the funding decisions for NASA and projects like Voyager get made, see this informative Facebook invite: https://www.facebook.com/events/1681287915473871/

I don't remember New York ever being a contested primary state before this election. Clinton won handily, and so did Al Gore, whatever that means. But my memories of the 2008 Democratic primaries are not well defined. In the car last week, on my way back to the city from a reading upstate, I was sure that Barack Obama had taken New York. It was one of those things I was so sure about that I immediately had to confirm it on Wikipedia. I was wrong. It was a Hillary state. But I was right about it being an easy win: there wasn't a contest here. The state was more or less ceded to her without a fight. So: not at all like this election. 2008 was won and loss without lifelong injury done to any of

Spend any time driving through enough of the United States—like I am, trying to do a book tour—and you will eventually find yourself on a road in-between stretches of forest that go on for as far as you can tell. Highways and forest land have been a pairing since the great interstate programs linked up all the cities with asphalt black lines. On city highways you tend to hang over the people that are moving in opposite directions than you. Sometimes, you are sunk further into the street, and it's the town that looms above you. The nature that exists on the shoulder is a grubby trash ground. Life persists, it finds a way, like the people in the city. This is not a highway, it's fast traffic.

You get tired trying to undo the way the planet moves beneath you. Desynchronosis. Time out of time. This post-AWP post is half an update, half space-fill, half excuse. Three places in one body: Tel Aviv, New York, and Los Angeles. You can feel them each by degrees. Oceansides, one after another after another, like waves, but made of millions and millions of people, with twenty four hours for all of them to share. I left AWP wanting more, which is probably the way it should end. I got to meet some great people, hear a lot of interesting ideas about books, see this poetry in the heat. Sometimes, it seemed like it was amazing. But then it was time to go, and suddenly I realized that anything I