A prophet is not without honor

I have to be a good boy here, in this blog, for the next few weeks, as I am going to be including schools in my California swing and I don't need some student, teacher or parent misinterpreting anything I have written or said (or, for that matter, correctly interpreting some of the things I have said or written) and getting all up in arms about it.

I have some regrets shaping up from this tour, some key people I would have loved to sat down to lunch with at least once while in Los Angeles, San Diego, Salinas and San Francisco (the boy knows how to pack a week). But, all in all, a man who has lived a major portion of the last decade and a half of his life in some form or other of exile knows the cost of pariahship (if not previously a word, I make it so...such is the power of a poet).

It will be good to get back with people who respect the poetry and the poet. Three years in West Virginia and I was unable to get a single second in a classroom, despite honors from such groups as the Appalachian Education Initiative and ArtsMon. I leak that I am going to California for a week and my schedule books up fast. A prophet is not without honor...

And trust me, this will be my prophecy tour, my voice in the desert time. Time, not to die, but to embrace that which is best in my legacy and life.

There will be trials and temptations, joy and sorrow, satisfaction and rage, all packed into barely a week...but that is what is good int his life, not to be lost in the grey, tasteless fog that is mediocrity and the somnambulism of entropy.