CURRENT MISSION

Intermission

ABOUT ME

Though born in California, and raised in Seattle, I’ve lived my entire adult life in Europe. While an avid traveller nearly constantly on the move, I’ve published four collections of poetry in Prague with the Czech press Dharmagaia. My poems have also appeared in The New Orleans Review, The Liberal, Café Irreal, Frogpond, and numerous other small journals. As a songwriter, my compositions have been recorded by artists from Sony and Warner.

There are three pillars in the temple of my happiness: Poetry, Music, and Love.

PHILOSOPHY

If I'd never met you,
I would never miss you.
But if I'd never met you,
I would miss myself.

Interests

• arts
• books
• poetry
• coloring
• reading
• music
• boxing
• geography

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

A few months prior to my journey to Ireland, I'd been wandering the streets of San Francisco. Late at night, a man approached me, and seeing that I was perched on a doorstep, reading beneath the streetlight, he said to me: “Hey man, you like books? I got books. Come with me, and I'll give 'em to ya.” My state of mourning for my brother had pushed me into an odd fearlessness, the state Emily Dickinson described when she wrote: “This is the hour of lead. / Remembered, if outlived, / As freezing persons recollect the snow: / First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.” Still in the cross-fade between 'chill' and 'stupor', without a thought as to the man's possibly ulterior intentions, I stood up and followed him down the street and up the stairs of a poorly-lit tenement building. Entering the room, he pulled out a small plastic bag with some kind of smack in it, and said: “Hey man, you want some of this?” I calmly relied “No, that's ok... where are the books you told me about?” He pointed to the corner, where a large cardboard box, overflowing with heaps of decaying newspapers, was resting on a chair. I walked over to the box, and started to shuffle through its contents; I pulled out a cheap romance novel, a second-grade geography book, and Ulysses by James Joyce. I'd heard about the book, but had not felt intellectually prepared to scale the Mt. Everest high cliff-face which its complexities appeared to embody. Still, something of the magically quirky circumstances under which I'd found the book electrified me like a flash of fate. “Can I have this book?” I asked the man as I walked towards the door. “Sure man, but you sure you don't want some of this?” “Yeah, I'm sure” I said as I sprang out the door and down the dark stairwell. “Thanks for the book.” I shouted behind me, my own voice echoing off the stone walls with a dull thunder: “for the book... the book... the book.”

So a few months later I found myself strolling through the mystic greens (I'd never known so many intricate shades of the color green existed!) of the Irish countryside with Ulysses beneath my arm. The poetry of the book, its alchemical crystallization of one blooming man's wilting day, massaged my soul. The book, and the feverish interest it aroused in me about Ireland, and its poets and writers, had been one of the key factors in my pilgrimage there. I hitchhiked around the country, got robbed in Belfast, walked in the Bloody Sunday Memorial March in Derry, tasted an Irish lassie's lips in Galway, met Bono in an art gallery in Dublin, and stood at Yeats's grave in Sligo, staring down at the words etched in marble: “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by.”

Countries I’ve Visited

Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Russian Federation, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom

Countries I’ve Lived In

Czech Republic, France, Israel, United States