The color of fog

Having lived my young life in a dark fog, call it a ground fog —it was a way to escape the adults who became erratic as the ravages of alcoholism, that dark fog began to descend upon that 50s vision of suburbia. The worlds never meshed, the optimism and conformity gave way to the turbulent 60s. I was far too young to be a counted among the movers and the shakers, but my mother delved into the darkness of the drug culture. For or a moment optimism shone, the city of hope in a bowl of light, we didn’t see beyond the edges of civilization, thinking it was the center of the universe. But as the darkness descended, all those hippies and some of our own folks began to die in doorways or in barrels from overdoses and drug deals gone wrong. The color of fog changed into despair. I watched so many people lost in that fog. Mine was a protective fog, insulation me against what was happening around me. That same fog protected and insulated me from a world falling apart. I emerged unscathed and slowly I found my poetic voice as it began to emerge from the fugue of darkness.

8/20 CPITS Symposium with Luis Rodriguez