Life and life and life and life and life and life and the life you know you thought you knew and life you definitely don't know and likely wouldn't even guess to know but know it's life nonetheless a slippery life a told life that still needs telling a telling life of course the life and life is life longer and more sustained than the life you are living because you don't pay as much attention to life anymore you're not in your 20s but OK it's life nonetheless it might be nonetheless is another good theme for the entire book life nonetheless life is life and life and life life is accumulating in your own hands in the poem with "poem" and Poem and poem maybe being this thing you think this poem is "about" but don't do that to yourself it's not it's life and you're feeling it reading something like this every day imagine if this was a daily exercise of life the life you imagine when you see that one guy walking down the street and he looks like he's got his life figured out and he doesn't except that life is life and life and life and life all together.
Ultimately, it's just so many different ways to say "gay" and "Kumeyaay," but the ways to say them keep making him say other things, or then he's actually just being Teebs, and it's not always about the identity alone, folks, maybe it's about being human, but every time he's human, he's also the Kumeyaay part or the gay part, and it becomes this cycle and cycle and cycle. I just want to be cycled in with it, too.
Think, though, of Muse. In the book’s opening, the way Pico attaches value to this Muse character (a character I would say acts as a fixture for affection), where affection for life would be the primary driver of these poems, and so Muse is a muse, but, he seems really ambivalent to the writer. It's an unusual circumstance between the two. But the expressive nature also helps him spell out what this guy means to him in a sequential way. It might be interesting, in fact, to think about how the book builds and sustains as it goes on. In this opening part, there is this note of "Yes, I am going to keep talking like this, GET USED TO IT! or DON'T YOU LOVE IT??”
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.