One of my most vivid memories of high school is the moment when I realized it was over for good. In June 1998, I graduated from Sonora High School, and after the ceremony came Grad Night -- a revel at a local amusement park that lasted until after sunrise. Frankly, it lasted longer than I did. By 3 a.m. or so, I was so fatigued that my prom date kept me awake by playing one-on-one laser tag, and many of my classmates had literally passed out from exhaustion on the floor around the arcade consoles. When the school bus crawled back into the Sonora parking lot, I jostled myself awake, and then a realization hit me: I no longer had any connection to the few dozen people who were on the bus with me. We were not classmates now but former classmates, and that invisible chain that had bonded us for four years had simply vanished. We got up and staggered down the steps, delivered into a new life in which we would not all be required to be in the same place at the same time on Monday mornings.

The film director Orson Welles had an efficient bit of advice about endings: "If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story." I want the story of my high school years to have a happy ending, and so I prefer to stop it before Grad Night. Before Grad Night, there was graduation. It was a great night. Teachers gave stirring tributes to us, and we gave the same to them. Horns blew. Cameras flashed. My friend gave a hilarious speech comparing high school to the movie Titanic. We linked arms, high-fived, embraced, and exulted in the feeling that four years of effort had not just paid off, but tangibly so -- those cords, mortarboards, tassels and mounted diplomas felt crisp in our fingers. Four years later, I went through the same rush of festivity, under slightly different circumstances, in college. By this point, I am long done with high school and very likely college as well, but I look forward to both graduations again: My daughter will collect her diplomas one day, and I expect to feel the same wonderful catharsis.

There are few human endeavors that make better endings than graduations. Sometimes, they serve as oases amid the imperfections in between. In the weeks before the ceremony itself, we -- teachers, students, even parents -- are often tired and frazzled. Desktops turn into mounds of paper, calendars into masses of strikethroughs and jottings. The momentum of the classroom lags as summer heat creeps in. Then there is the awkward matter of the weeks after graduation, a moment of suspension before the next phase begins. Friend groups stick together, even as their bonds sometimes begin to fray; in September, different campuses and new peer groups await everyone. Texts and emails grow fewer and farther between. Faces that we once saw in person daily shrink to icons on social media. The symbolism of the high school reunion, ten years later, is poignant: We find out how one another's lives turned out, for the simple reason that we didn't know.

My poem "Commencement Day," which appears this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder, is an ode to those imperfect farewells. It takes place the morning of commencement on a college campus, where an RA, or resident advisor, has invited 115 classmates to join him in a group prayer at sunrise at the lake outside Humanities Hall. (That character is based on me; I was never an RA in college and have never hosted a group prayer, but have a history of trying to orchestrate grand moments.) As it turns out, the 115 invitations net two respondents: a twin brother and sister who show up with their Bible, then toss it back in their truck when they realize that the group prayer is off. Instead, they find a rowboat left idling on the lake and mark it up with things they didn't do over the last four years: offices run for, vacations taken, moments of meditation by the lake. The poem ends before the actual commencement ceremony. We can assume that it goes well.

"Commencement Day" is one of the 44 poems in my book The First Thing Mastered, which came out 10 years ago from Tebot Bach. This was the first book that I wrote as a cohesive collection, and it follows a narrative thread: The four sections cover the years from birth to early middle age, touching on infancy, peer pressure, adolescence, college, young adulthood, and finally marriage and parenthood. Writing The First Thing Mastered was an intensive process, to the point where I took an entire week off work simply to sit at home and complete it. (For someone who travels obsessively every chance he gets, that was some dedication.) Once the book came out, I sent copies to a slew of people, including former high school teachers and college professors. Years after we graduate, we still sometimes feel like that earnest, hungry kid, glancing to our elders for a sign that we're doing things right. I'm not sure if they tell you that at commencement.

Note: This poem is dedicated to the 8th-grade class at St. Cyril of Jerusalem School, who graduated last Thursday. I know that it will not be their last perfect finish.

"Elegy for a Rhythm Guitarist" is not my first poem, but it wins that title by default. I wrote it in the spring of 1998, a couple of months before graduating from high school, and it appeared in the campus literary magazine that went home to parents. Before that, I had written a few poems as class assignments and maybe attempted a few others on my own time, but all of those efforts have been lost to time and memory. When I entered college that fall, as far as I was concerned, I brought one poem with me. I read "Elegy" at a handful of campus readings and got it published in the UCI magazine Faultline in the spring of 1999. In my book Tea and Subtitles: Selected Poems 1999-2019, that poem is the sole representative of the first year in the title. In 1999, it was all that I had.

Every artist starts somewhere, and it's usually a more earnest place than where they end up. Woody Allen's first movies were lightweight comedies. Bob Dylan spent his first two albums faking an accent of some kind -- on "Blowin' in the Wind," he seems to be trying to impersonate an Okie twenty years his senior. When I wrote "Elegy," I'm not sure if I was trying to impersonate anyone, but if so, it was probably a songwriter rather than a poet. The engine that drives the poem is its rhythm and rhyme, and if I remember correctly, I was trying to evoke the sound of a rapid guitar that the titular character might strum. The LAST thing you HEAR is a SOFT chord in A, / ringing UNder the BASS at the END of the SONG -- that meter never stops throughout the poem, except for the final line of each stanza, which drops one beat. I wrote it, first and foremost, as a musical piece. Not being a composer, I have no idea what a suitable melody might be.

I like "Elegy for a Rhythm Guitarist" a lot. In the quarter-century since I trepidatiously handed it to the high school magazine editor, I've written many poems that I consider deeper, subtler, or more mature -- but, then, there's a reason we still pull up those early Allen movies or Dylan songs too. They represent part of a journey, a process of discovery, and sometimes those early efforts can hit upon some genuine truths, even if we know the artist eventually moved past them. Would I ever write another poem like "Elegy"? Probably not. But the nice thing is that I don't have to. I wrote it already when I was 18, and I'm content to let it stand. (The poem appears as this week's feature in the Journal of Radical Wonder.)

A common question that I get about the poem is whether it's about a real person. The answer is that it's based on one: Brian Jones, the founder of the Rolling Stones, who was kicked out of the band in 1969 due to his erratic behavior (fueled by drugs) and drowned in his swimming pool soon after. The last Stones track that Jones appears on is "You Got the Silver," on which he strums an autoharp in the background. It would be tidy to say that it marked the farewell of the band's original lineup, but it actually features just four of the five; Mick Jagger sits out the track while Keith Richards takes over on lead vocals. No matter. It's a gorgeous song (some days my favorite Stones piece), and the sense of longing in the tune and lyrics complement the knowledge, in hindsight, that it marks the last diminished contribution of a member who was once the band's guiding force.

I first heard the song that senior year of high school, and even then, I had no intention of romanticizing Jones. He was, by all accounts, a reprehensible man in terms of his treatment of women, and his decline should serve as a caution to anyone even considering toying with drugs. But, as the saying goes, merciless is not the same as pitiless. What moved me upon hearing that track was the idea of anyone's final essence being captured on tape and preserved for posterity -- even more poignant if it were a rhythm guitarist (usually not the most prominent member of a band) rather than a singer or soloist. If you listen to the Stones' 1960s albums in order, you will Jones start out boldly, then fade and finally disappear. "You Got the Silver" is the last moment before the disappearance.

As a high school senior in 1998, I wasn't going to submit a poem about the Rolling Stones to the campus magazine. "Elegy for a Rhythm Guitarist" became a fiction piece, with the musicians now a coed garage band and the title character's death, though still drug-related, caused by a car crash rather than drowning. The tape that the guitarist last played on resides in the narrator's apartment, rather than Tower Records. Looking back on that 18-year-old who worked a story poem out of Brian Jones' swan song, I'm proud of his moderation. He was boy enough to spin a tale about playing in a rock and roll band, and man enough to give it a sober ending.

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I have come to view poetry as a conversation. Twenty-some years ago, I viewed it as a monologue. I wrote all my worst poetry as an undergraduate, and part of the problem stemmed from the fact that I considered it my best. A mathematical principle may be in order here: A poet's ego is inversely proportional to the quality of his or her work. In those days, fueled perhaps by romantic visions of Mozart in the movie Amadeus, I convinced myself that a true genius didn't need to make revisions. I let everything tumble out in a single draft, jotting as fast as I could before the moment of inspiration passed. The result was, to quote a prose poem by Eric Morago, lots of "terrible, awful poetry -- shoeboxes full of folded, crumpled notebook paper that you can one day use for kindling when you're old enough to start a really good blaze."

​I don't recall ever burning those old poems, but suffice to say that most of them no longer exist. Still, a few pieces rose at least to a level of competence, and I finally amassed enough to cobble them into a chapbook called Thief After Dark, which came out in 2002 from FarStarFire Press. (Amazon still lists the book, but notes that it has "limited availability" and asks, rather optimistically, "Have one to sell?") Of the 24 poems in Thief After Dark, I am still fond of about half a dozen, and when I scanned the table of contents the other day, I noticed a similarity among them: I had written most of them when I was least self-conscious. That's another way of saying that I was half-asleep. On the nightstand by my bed in the dorm, I kept a notepad and a pencil, in hopes that intuition would strike midway through the night. Wouldn't Mozart, at least in that movie, have done the same?

A few times, I did indeed wake up with an idea, scribble it down, and then fall back asleep. Among the fruits of that strategy was "Host," which appears this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder and is probably my favorite poem of those undergraduate years. It's a short piece -- most of my nocturnal ones were -- and consists of two rhyming sentences, each broken up by a long dash (a heightened pause) in the middle. The poem doesn't officially have a meter, but it settles into a casual rhythm when read aloud.

What intrigues me most (I say "intrigues" because I am so far removed from the 21-year-old who wrote it) is the premise. It's a vignette about a pair of nameless characters, and while plenty in the poem in unexplained, nothing is inexplicable. We can fill in the blanks. Starting with the monosyllabic title -- "Host" -- it's obvious that the poem is about a performer of sorts: a host, an entertainer, a provider of hospitality (or sanctuary?) to others. Before he passes the reefers out, / he checks himself in the mirror -- black jacket with the collar pressed, / hair parted, / skin like sand. Obviously, his appearance matters to him as much as the actual offering to his guests. As one who is adamantly not a junkie, I admit to knowing little about recreational drugs, but I've always thought of marijuana as a relatively cheap and easy substance to obtain. Why, then, is the host dressing up like Gatsby to dispense it? Perhaps he fancies himself providing a high to the beautiful people. We are all entitled to our fantasies.

When he tore the cuff link on his right, / he lit her cigarette with his left -- Now, another character enters the poem, obviously someone who arouses the host's desire to impress. Why does he not simply put on a new cuff link? Perhaps he doesn't have one. In any case, he carefully guards his image, keeping the imperfect side away from her eyes. ...knowing that when the hour was late, / she would never let herself be drugged / by a less than perfect hand. Would she really not, or is he projecting his own standards onto her? How many of us go out of our way to "impress others," when our real aim is to appease our own shaky confidence?

Who is this host, really: an undergraduate, a dealer, an underground playboy? Who are the other guests to whom he passes out reefers? Is he content with the woman simply adoring his hand? Questions about this poem abound. Please don't ask me to answer any of them. As noted above, I was barely awake when I wrote it.

My latest entry in the Journal of Radical Wonder is "Ride Home," a poem that originally came out in the 2016 book Angels in Seven. There is no great inspiration behind this one; like many poems, it simply arose from free writing. A mother and son return home from a fair in the rain. The son has won a stuffed giraffe. The mother hopes he had a good time. There is another person, apparently her husband and the boy's father, waiting at home. Something is amiss with the family, but they survive, at least for another day. Dinner is soup, and they sleep in separate rooms. At least, they plan to -- the final lines of the poem use the future tense with "will." Perhaps the characters have their routine memorized.

For this poem, I used couplets, which is a form that I gravitate to frequently. I think I like the visual look of them; even with enjambment, they have a pleasing rhythm on the page, with a line, then a response, and then a pause. Many of my favorite poems are couplet poems. Here is one called "Nocturne" by Jennifer K. Sweeney, which opens her book How to Live on Bread and Music (Perugia Press, 2009):

           There is a blue city in mind
           constructed slantways

           along a rippling canal,
           clean and unpeopled but for a musician

           who plays a harp without strings.
           The city has one chair

           where he sits by the broad strokes of water.
           A lone streetlamp tends

           its blue arc of light.
           A Persian door. A zeppelin sky.

           The world filters through
           his empty frame as he plucks the air.

           Maybe you hear a song or maybe you don't.
           That is the choice we are always making.

That poem probably inspired any number of mine. I can't say which ones, or how, but it probably did. I have found that poetic inspiration works that way -- not a matter of imitation, but absorption. Often, before I start writing, I read a poem by another author. It doesn't matter which one. Someone has begun a conversation on the page, and I keep that conversation going: by borrowing a single word, structuring a sentence a similar way, taking an object or emotion and twisting it into new associations. Consider some of the phrases in Sweeney's poem: What color other than blue might a city be? What other locations might have a single chair? A harp without strings -- what other item might go without an essential part?

Many of my first drafts begin with questions like that. By the time the poems are finished, they bear no trace of the original inspiration; through multiple drafts, they've found their own way. My own pieces may inspire others. Likely, I'll never know. What matters is that we try. Poetry is written by human beings, and I think we'll go on writing it as an act of defiance no matter how powerful ChatGPT becomes.

"Ride Home" is one of my personal favorite poems that I've written. Originally, it was a much longer piece, but the revision process condensed it. I am particularly proud of the phrase "say grace for what is second-rate," which I may have written as an admonition to myself. I have a history of wanting things to be sublime. Sometimes, we have to accept the imperfect. That's another choice -- to borrow a line from Sweeney -- that we are always making.

In her great short story "Marigolds," Eugenia W. Collier writes that memory "is an abstract painting — it does not present things as they are, but rather as they feel." My poem "College Town," which appears this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder, came from a similarly indirect origin. This poem was inspired by a memory of the University Center outdoor shopping plaza at UC Irvine, which I attended as an undergraduate, and it is a memory of a night that never took place. In a poetic sense, that doesn't disqualify it from being true.

I love colleges, and I love college towns. My own abstract painting depicts them as p​laces of hope, exhilaration, and rejuvenation -- safe havens from a volatile world, where the free flow of ideas and scores of young people contribute to an overall sense that something good will happen here. Perhaps it will be an idea that births a more democratic world; perhaps it will be atonement for the past; perhaps it will be eyes opened and barriers broken. Am I romanticizing and simplifying? Yes, but my inner Chagall doesn't care. You may have seen Richard Linklater's film Boyhood, which ends with the protagonist -- after aging 12 years onscreen -- driving to his first day of college.That scene made me misty-eyed. Plain and simple, I envied the boy.

​"College Town" depicts the kind of night that I hope he might have had once he settled into campus. Linklater's character is a photographer, after all, and I wrote "College Town" as a visual piece; if I could submit any of my poems to be painted as a mural, this would be the one. Again, it's all fictional, at least as a whole. But I'm sure that on a campus somewhere, there is (or at least was) an old blues musician strumming his guitar at a corner hangout, a movie about the Lost Boys of Sudan playing at an art-house cinema, young people of Aztec heritage hoping to gain admittance to a hip club, a photo exhibit about the Great Depression, maybe even a fountain and a corner magician. Put them all together, and you have a setting that defies cynicism. That's what college is all about. Please don't remind me otherwise.

Two other notes about this poem, for whatever they're worth:

1. While I am very fond of "College Town" as a piece of writing, I have almost never performed it at live readings, simply because it is very hard to read aloud: one meandering sentence that finally ends with a period at the end. That was intentional, as I wanted to capture the feeling of constant, frenetic movement. I have a feeling that this poem could be performed well, but it might require a group of readers (or maybe an experimental choir) to do it justice.

2. This is one of my few poems to have an actual sequel: "Blues Man," which takes the musician mentioned in the opening lines and flips the scene to show his perspective. That poem actually got more attention than "College Town," and it appears on the website of the Poetry Foundation. I will get to it in a future post.