Anticipation better not get the best of me. An hour before my partner in XXX crime arrives to pick me up to go to Sardo’s Grill & Lounge, the so-called home of the San Fernando Valley’s Tuesday night Porn Star Karaoke, expectations are flying around, having a heyday. We have both been assigned to check out where the valley’s living exhibits go after a long, hard day at work to relax and hang loose, no pun intended. I repeatedly tell myself there’s no point in all this anticipating, that thinking too much about what will be will kill it. But in all fairness to myself, fantasizing about it is half the fun. All I can think about is having to sing “Physical” or “She’ll Be Cuming ‘Round the Mountain” to a crowd of drunken adult film stars while my arm is draped around Roxanne Hall and the new Jenna Jameson.

Reading Will Alexander’s poetry is like walking into a Jackson Pollock painting: you get lost in a maelstrom of colors, lulled by beautifully constructed metaphors, and unexpectedly shaken by the jarring sounds of each hard-handed stroke. Through Alexander’s work, words fill three-dimensional forms and talk back to you with distinct colors, voices and angles. An autodidact born and raised in South Central L.A., Alexander’s early work didn’t fit into conventional, academically defined structures. After years of carving out his own niche, Alexander is now internationally recognized as a leading literary figure. A poet, essayist, novelist and visual artist, his accomplishments include the Whiting Fellowship for Poetry in 2001 and a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2002, and he was named by The International Biographical Centre in Cambridge as the Outstanding Scholar of the 20th Century. Alexander’s most recent collection of poetry, The Sri Lankan Loxodrome, is a surreal adventure embedded with a lexicon all its own and laced with seemingly disconnected words applied to the page like that of smattered paint.

I fell three feet and into a puddle of grape-flavored Juicy Juice. Not too much juice, it was probably just from one carton. But this was no ordinary puddle; there was something different about it. I knew that because it told me. “Hey you! I’m no ordinary puddle!” it said.

Her nervous toes danced under the table. She thought- on this dismal day in South West London- the time had come to confess her state of tangled affairs. She could, given the spotlight for long enough, call attention to quite a few issues plaguing the Longley family dynamic. But instead, she thought it best to focus solely on the whole-bodied emotional affair she had been having with her parents’ neighbors’ 33 year-old son, Kingsley Stone, whom she had met three years prior at an equally dismal Christmas dinner. The families had come together in their typically matte fashion, and her husband Bill had his shirt ironed crisp and wore a smile only she could forget.

Rob Schrab fidgets across from me in a large, sunken green chair in his living room, adjusting positions at least three times before he settles comfortably into the seat. He has, after all, quite a lot to be excited about: his recent Emmy win for “Outstanding Music and Lyrics,” which he co-wrote for the opening number at this year’s Academy Awards, a recurring directing and writing role on Comedy Central’s The Sarah Silverman Program, and the consummation of the long-anticipated comeback of Scud The Disposable Assassin: The Whole Shebang.