We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough will be a brook you can swim in

Some cool news to share with friends, and I think I'm officially allowed to share now that it's on the catalog page: My first full length poetry book, We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough, will be coming out from Publishing Genius Press in 2010. I like PGP a lot: they publish really awesome stuff that slices the whatever between charm nuts and heart knock like some kind of excellent fencer. Including a neon war balloon of a novel whose film rights were recently bought by Spike Jonze.

Anyway, I am very excited to be working with PGP and the breakdancing soul genius of Adam Robinson, to be publishing a book, to be sharing this news with you. Mizz Chels, famous Oakland fortune teller and confused helmet owner, is doing the cover art. The book is about one face plus or minus another.

A favor: might people suggest things I can do to get people excited about the book? When it comes time for that. Like things I can do that aren't stupid? Like if I tried to bake pretzals with poems embedded, I might end up stupid at that and then no one would like me or my stupid book.

To close: thank you everyone who has read my poems or helped me write them, and thanks as well to everyone who has given me a ride or let me taste something on their plate, acts that go too often unthanked. I've got video of the Bay Area Reading Tour and all the eclairs* (*an eclair is a really cool person) involved, but I have to edit it. First here is a love song that I made on my toy guitar in Oroville and June. It's probably about you:



MARY BLESS A BOY WITH HIS SUNGLASSES

I know your arms
Are there for more
Than me to fall into
I know you do things
With your life
And whoa that's pretty cool!

But if you were a parapet
I'd be the gargoyle
And we'd be a two for one deal.
If you were a sugar beet
I'd be the convict who
Slept out all night in your field.

(seventh of the root!)

Mary bless a boy with his sunglasses
He needs all the help he can get
Mary bless a boy with his sunglasses
Right up until the point that he lo(whoo! whoo!)ses it

Sha da da. Sha da da. Sha da da da da daaa --

We dare the world
To rain on us
When we dress up like this
Your brutal disregard
For reality
Is the thing about you I like best

But if you were a marshmallow
I'd be the campfire
That singes your edges just right
If you were a cocoa leaf
I'd be the one percent
Extract illegal to buy

(repeat seventh of root! repeat chorus!)

I see the world. It's just a little dark.
I see the world. It's just a little dark.
I see the world. It's just a little dark.
I see the world. It's just a little dock.
I see the world. It's just a little dock.
I see the world. It's just a little dock.
I see the world. It's just a little dark.
I see the world. It's just a little dock.

Boop da doop da doop doo.