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I decided to do the National Poetry Month Challenge… I posted my first two poems on tumblr, I just wanted to make sure I had them in my blog to for those of you who just follow me here.
Hope you enjoy the poems and I hope I can get through 30 poems this month!
So I woke up this morning and had a little bit of a panic attack because my play, “Midnight Makeout Session,” opens in two weeks from tomorrow on Dec. 3rd. Now I say “my” play, because I not only star in it, but I also wrote it.
What the play is about and all that, can be found out at midnightmakeoutsession.com, but I’m sitting down right now to talk about why I wrote it… Well see, it’s kinda like a love note to all those who we’re here in Los Angeles in the 90’s, running around this crazy town we call home, Hollywood. We we’re all just kids back then, hustling our careers by day and by night, chasing adventure in the golden age of the LA club scene. Now we’re all grown up and this play discusses all the things I want to talk about to all my friends from those times. Some of us are still here working, some have passed away, some have left town to return to wherever they came from to continue their lives.
I hope friends around town can come check it out and reminisce about some of those times, but anyone who wants to revisit a more romantic time in life, this is for you. It’s also for people who love 90’s Hip Hop and R&B, the play is full of that because that was the soundtrack of my life… For all of us really, back then, every club spun everything from Jay-Z, Usher, R. Kelly t0 Biggie, Tupac… Man, back then, if you we’re at the right clubs, there would be a good chance you would be partying with them! (Shout out to “Joseph’s”, “Dublins”, “B-Sides”…)
And if you’re just a fan of me, well, you’re invited too… If you come see the play, you probably get to know me better. All the male characters are basically different aspects of me, mixed in with my closest friends and the girls… well, you know how that goes, if we’ve dated in the past, chance are you might see a glimpse of you showing up in this piece.
Now, it’s not a perfect play in any way… in fact, it’s the first play I wrote, but it’s me.
So… I personally invite you to the Midnight Makeout Session.
I dig Valentine’s Day. I woke up not too long ago and I find myself watching “500 Days of Summer,” it’s Valentine’s Day and seems like the perfect way to slowly start this day, just sipping a cup of coffee, eating some yogurt, still in the sweat pants I slept i last night watching Zooey Deschanel, who I find incredibly cute and infinitely watchable, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the awkward love story in a picturesque downtown Los Angeles.
I’m posting a few love poems I’ve written in the past, I didn’t write anything new this year, I’m still in love and I gave her a bike instead of a poem this year… That alone sounds funny, but it was her first bike and to see her face when she saw this red beach cruiser with with a Happy Valentine’s Day balloon attached to was priceless. It was like that feeling you had when you were a kid waking up Christmas morning to find a new bike under the tree, pure childish elation… Now, I have to teach her how ride the thing. I don’t remember how to teach someone how to do that. I just remember crashing a few times when I was learning from my older brother Derek.
Today is cool if you have someone to share it with… it’s even ok if you don’t, just celebrating that love is out there in the world and the pursuit of it all is a worthy cause.
So go kiss someone you dig or go commiserate with friends because you don’t have someone to kiss, but just go celebrate this intangible thing that we all watch movies about and poets write poems about and singers sing songs about… Happy Valentine’s Day.
I just wanted to write about tonight a bit while it’s fresh in my mind… I was running from a speaking engagement at USC to meet up with my co-founders of DPL-Da Poetry Lounge at a spot called Bakery Poetry Lounge in the Noho Arts District, apparently they were going to honor us… I guess, for being some of the pioneers who helped create the modern poetry scene in Los Angeles. Anyhow, I rush to the spot and of course I’m the last one to arrive and find my old friends and partners, Shihan, Poetri and Gimel, together, we are the founders. I walk into the waiting room, to smiles, thankfully it wasn’t time for us to be announced, and I’m like, “So what are we doing?” Shihan laughs and says, “I don’t know.” And the whole crew is in chuckles and what not, showing the looseness of the situation. Gimel pretty much set up the situation and we all came to be apart it.
I’m only writing about this, because, although I didn’t know exactly what the plan was for the evening, it managed to turn into a special night. We figured we’d go onstage and rock a few poems and take some questions from the audience and… I guess be honored. But the thing is, we haven’t all been onstage like that together, rocking poems for many years now. Yeah, we still all attend our poetry venue, but usually not all there at the same time, and sometimes, we don’t even hit the mic to perform, leaving space and room for all the other worthy poets to tell their stories. But tonight, we we’re all back together again, rocking poems, old and new… and telling stories about how this whole thing got started, how we kept it going and how it not only shaped what we now know as the poetry scene in LA, but how it’s shaped us individually.
See, a lot people out there only know me as an actor, a profession and craft that I am ferociously proud of, but being apart of the LA poetry scene and creating something out of nothing… with these guys, well that remains as one of my most prized accomplishments in my life. I don’t often think about it, writing poems and telling stories is just apart of how we communicate. Culturally, I guess, it’s just the way we’ve always communicated, but when I look back over the last two decades and we talk about all the things we went through as young struggling artist, from Shihan living on my couch, all the way to Poetri winning a Tony on Broadway and the beginning of it all, it was us getting together, inviting friends… and friends of friends to a theater on Tuesdays night to hear some poems and share some stories. We worried if anyone would show up… But they did, and they always do… Every Tuesday night. And in some small way, it feels like we help change the world… at least every Tuesday night at Da Poetry Lounge.
A quick poem from my instagram (@rufiozuko)… People have always asked me to write a poem about “Honor,” well, here it is…
A poem called Honor, for something lost of misplaced
Etched into your consciousness like a scare upon your face
This Honor that you chase, isn’t always what you’ve thought
Matter fact, the fact that you’ve always had it is the very reason
You set out to prove it’s existence from the start.
So here’s a new poem I recently penned. I was driving down Wilshire today on my scooter and and saw a dope piece of street art and decided to jump off the Vespa and spit a quick poem. (Shout out to artist Curtis Kulig!!!) Sorry about the poor sound quality… it was one of those spur of the moment performance… I was just by myself, happened to have my camera on me… I wonder what people thought as they were flying down Wilshire as I’m yelling on the corner.
Hope you enjoy it…
Dante Basco: My take on life... 