The Golden Ass

“Red is the color of the water in the rock here,” I stammered, looking down at my poem. That was the first line of an inspired poem, “City of Angels,” which I had penned early one morning in a new far away city that I was soon to call home. The line streamed from my mouth as smoothly as the stammering paper on which it was written, that shook nervously in my hand. While I sheepishly began to walk back toward my seat and the other forty or fifty artists in the café clapped politely, my other hand remained safely hidden in my pocket. At the end of the night, Harry, the host of Expression Mondays, purposefully made eye contact with me in the midst of the chaotic crowd and said, “Hey man, that was poetry!”

Weeks later, I gazed directly into the eyes of my audience as I said, “Have you seen the white haired monk, who is walking,” and my hands motioned in a rhythm and figure that mirrored the action of the poem as I continued, “And gazing and piercing slowly along in the desert?” When I sat down, another of the performers, Lisa, I think her name was, made direct and purposeful eye contact with me and said, “You write poetry about the things that no one can explain.” In that moment, her eyes became, “A union of the white in the sky and the shadow in the branch,” much like the deep piercing eyes of the monk, in the poem, about whom I had just spoken. That café became a home for me.

My third week at Expression Mondays was Adam Noble’s first. I saw him in the crowd at the end of the night, and he remarked, “As I was listening to your poem, I felt like I was taking a bath in a rainbow.” Some months later, with butterflies in my stomach, I thought back on his remark before venturing out on stage at the Baha’i Center for their open mike night. I gave all of my energy and heart to the performance; as I entered the poem’s last stanza, which began, “Here igniting we see hot white fire burning brightly,” I sensed the energy in the room rising in coordination with each line of the poem. As my hands gyrated around and then settled with the poem, the audience, which filled a room that was quite a bit larger than the intimate little café of Expression Mondays, immediately, spontaneously, and in unison jumped up and erupted into a long, cheering, pandemonian uproar that lasted all the way until I hesitantly sat back down in my seat with a sheepish smile. By then, I realized I had something to offer to the world.

Months later, after I had not performed in a long time, I was not surprised to learn of the end of the event that had become home to my community of artists. One night, the owner of the little Rockotitlan café, where Expression Mondays was held, got on stage. Although his English was usually very good, he stuttered and stammered his way through announcing the café’s closure and Expression Mondays’ end. By that time, though, I saw that I had been seeking my own glory. I had been offering my poems as extensions of myself.

Long before I moved to Los Angeles, my architecture professor once said, “One definition of home is a place you return to.” This statement became a reality for me when, years after Expression Mondays ended, I returned to Los Angeles for the host’s wedding. I stayed at a Christian brother’s apartment because, without question, I always counted on my Christian community, which had been open for centuries. While in town, numerous times, I passed by the Expression Mondays’ sign, overgrown with the vines of time. The sign, however, still remained bolted to the stuccoed wall of what had been the once vibrant Rockotitlan café. I realized, then, that I returned less to the scattered community of artists who I loved and more to that of the Living One who was teaching me to trust. Later, when my pastor said, “I bring an offering; I am the offering,” I realized that I carry with me something more powerful than myself to offer to the world. I bear a love that, by necessity, simultaneously includes and is greater than both myself and my poem.

*I did the above drawing while living in Los Angeles, "The City of Angels."