Michael McLaughlin
email: mycalmac@sbcglobal.net

A three time $17,000 California Arts Council grant recipient, Michael McLaughlin has worked for sixteen years as an Artist -in-Residence at Atascadero State Hospital, a maximum security forensic facility, as a Contract Artist with the California Department of Corrections and California Youth Authority (w/ incarcerated adults & youth), and with California Poets in the Schools.  

A graduate of The University of Southern California's' Master of Professional Writing program, McLaughlin's written one novel, Western People Show Their Faces and three books of poetry, Ped Xing,   The Upholstery of Heaven and Countless Cinemas.

Originally from San Francisco, McLaughlin lives on the central California coast with his brilliant and beautiful fiance and his 17 year old bass guitar-playing son.  Currently completing his second novel, Gang of One, McLaughlin was Poet Laureate of San Luis Obispo, California  in 2003.

 

 

 

I would have taken a cleaver
                        Gaza Strip November 1995

I asked the mother of a young man
who’d blown himself up
what she would have done 

if she’d known 
what her son was 
planning to do.

I would have taken a cleaver, 
cut open my heart
and stuffed him deep inside. 

she said.

Then I would have sewn it up tight
to keep him safe.

~Michael McLaughlin




Somersault

I knew a death that no once shared.  Somersaulting
twelve years old, in a neighbor’s pool
when my friend had gone inside
to answer a phone since his parents were at work.
I wanted to set a record--twelve forward and backward
somersaults in a row--without coming up for air.

I could cheat distance under water--fifty meters
without a breath.  No thought of death alone in a ball,
speed all that was important, arms
moving in circles, like paddles
or frogging along the tiled bottom
from one end to the other
and back.

But at my friend, Mark’s house
I passed out.  And found
the bottom of the pool on my side.  The surface
so close but so far away.  This was
the death I shared with myself.  The cement 
wasn’t scratchy but soft.  Geometry was there
for a moment of color, a geometry of absence
I was never meant to use.
I shared a death with myself, shooting to the surface,
it would have been too embarrassing to have been
found dead.  I shared a death with myself, my so-called friend
still on the phone.

Behind the sliding glass door
two uncapped cokes on a table.  The t.v. was on.
He was still on the phone.

I cried quickly and went home.  The other world
the one

at the bottom of the pool
had been so much softer.    




Countless Cinemas
     with thanks to Donald S Lopez Jr.

the yogacara speak
of a form of consciousness 

where all the seeds 
of past deeds
are deposited.

one by one these seeds
come to fruition
simultaneously 

creating a person 
and a private world.

a universe of closet sized cinemas
each occupied by a single person

eternally viewing a different film. 

everything is of the nature of consciousness

the product of one's own projections.

ignorance and suffering 
believe the yogacara
result from feeling 
the movie to be real.
                                                                  ~Michael McLaughlin

 

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