Practically Advice is a collection of phrases, lines, and aphorisms. It follows Never Mind, Gertrude Stein in that regard.
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July 7, 2012
Practically Advice
October 29, 2011
Walking in Asheville
Walking in Asheville is poems and photographs, composed in Asheville, North Carolina, in the summer of 2011. It bears a resemblance to Walking in San Francisco, Walking in Ellensburg, and Walking in the Village (NYC), also on this site.
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December 21, 2010
The Chair Outside the Door
The Chair Outside the Door is a book of 26 poems, originally written as “Sonnets to Rilke”, after his “Sonnets to Orpheus.”
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September 12, 2010
On Board the Victoria Clipper
On Board the Victoria Clipper is a collection of impressions written aboard the Victoria Clipper from Seattle to Victoria, BC.
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September 9, 2010
July 28, 2010
The Ocean in a Bottle
“The Ocean in a Bottle” is a small collection of poems that was my part of the poetry anthology “Five on the Western Edge,” from Momo’s Press (Stephen Vincent), published in ’77. Included in the anthology were myself (as Steve Brooks) Stephen Vincent, Hilton Obenzinger, Beau Beausoleil, and Larry Felson. It was Stephen’s idea that we, a diverse group of male poets, writing in the Seventies, would get together for a year before publication, talk, hash out, and mull over our various ways of living as writers in relationship with others and the world. It was a noble idea, but there wasn’t much open talk among us, as there might have been if Dr. Phil were present, but he wasn’t. Stephen wanted to call the book, “Five Disturbed Men,” but that was roundly rejected. Later, in my poetry satire, “The Blood and Turnips Poetry Festival”, I parodied that idea as “Five Disturbed Men on the Brink of Disaster.” I’ve reconnected with the others on facebook, but we are all as terse as ever in our non-confessional maleness. Poetry may be, as Stéphane Mallarmé, I think, once said, a way of saying what one has difficulty feeling, but open discourse is another matter, altogether.
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May 27, 2010
A Conversation Among Raindrops
A Conversation Among Raindrops was written when I got back to the US, after spending time in the company of a great teacher, H.W.L. Poonja, called Poonjaji, also called Papaji, in Lucknow, India, in early ’92. Raindrops was my attempt to say something similar to what I had heard from him, not to repeat his teaching but to speak in my own voice what I knew to be true in my own reality. Raindrops is Enlightenment 101, for those who want to know what that kind of teaching is all about or to experience it in colloquial American. I felt at home in the reality I experienced in India, and I asked myself why I didn’t stay there, if it was so compatible. “Because I’m not an Indian, I’m an American,” was my reply. I was raised a Christian in Illinois and Nebraska, with some question and some acceptance. In these contemplations, I address the awareness that found resonance in an eighty-year-old Indian. The essential elements of my awareness did not change when I went to India, they were only confirmed. Among Raindrops is an expression of that confirmation of the essential reality that is the same for everyone everywhere.
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March 16, 2010
I Am Godot
I Am Godot is a play, written after Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett. This play bears little resemblance to that iconic play, but it owes its existence to that original work.
I Am Godot: A No-man Show was written in 2017.
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January 3, 2009
January 2, 2009
Cafe Life
Café Life is a character study of the “third place.” Not home and not work, it is the café, coffeehouse, neighborhood bar, old style candy store or soda fountain. It is the modern equivalent of the town square or the watering hole where all the animals come.
Café Life is a partial gallery of the characters of one such place, The Owl and Monkey Café, on Ninth Avenue, on the NJudah trolley line, in San Francisco, during January of 1981, just as the Reagan Presidency was about to begin, not long after John Lennon had been shot, but it could be any year in any similar place, where people gather around a watering hole or a fire to warm themselves or refresh themselves, to find themselves, or to avoid themselves.
Such a café is a clearing in the woods that’s safe and unsafe at the same time. Some people will stay too long, and some people will stay away. Eventually, almost everyone will show up. I made a decision to sit still, in one place, for as long as I could, to stop running, to see who would come to me if I didn’t move. Over several years, I met literally thousands of people. This collection chronicles a few of them.
I’ll be forever grateful to The Owl and the Monkey Café and places like it. They are wonderful places, and I celebrate their existence. I’ve been writing, happily, in cafés for nearly forty years.
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Steve Brooks (Abhaya) - Poetry, Prose & Art 
