After I graduated from Sonoma State, in the spring of '99, I moved to the East Bay. I set my bags down in my sister's small studio found off of Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley. During the weekdays, I would commute via Bart and Muni to an elementary school in San Francisco where I would teach dance to "at risk" youth. During this year, it became increasingly harder and harder for me to focus on the daily pattern of repetition that I had created for myself. Rather, the scenic vistas of the Bay Area skyline would sweep me off into fantastical daydreams and down paths that usually led away from where I was supposed to be. My footfalls were heard, and found, throughout that city during that last year of a millenium. I remember those fall and winter nights, when the dark would roll in early and the Pacific would bring thick winds along with it. One night, I was walking on an overpass when a text written with a black sharpie caught my eye. There on the gray metalic support of the freeway bridge, someone had stopped just long enough to scrawl the following words:
Big black boots
that can crush
like leaves
you under
the wake
of all that once was
my ornery sanity
now just little flakey pieces
of cereal
the butterfly of change has once again spoken
so i here i sit
so there i sat
so here i am
so there i'm gone.
So, was this my beginning introduction into the land of embodiment?
Who is to say, really?
Nonetheless, that poem still sits in a black and white composition book that I keep tucked away in one of my bedroom shelves.
