All right.
So I'm going to read a few more.
Then, yeah, I'm going to read a new poem.
And then I'll see if you guys want to talk.
"Elegy"
I was going to read the title poem.
I honestly was.
But Grace's student just--
I mean Grace's friend--
she just like, she read it for me,
so I'm just not even going to mess with that.
It's recorded.
She did an excellent job.
I will say that one thing I liked about it is she
took lines from different points in the poem.
A lot of times people do a found poem
and they just take the first seven lines and rearrange them.
But she actually went to different places in the poem.
I was like, "damn that shit is good!"
[LAUGHTER]
And then I feel like that's arrogant
because I was like, "oh, I wrote that."
That's kind of--
[LAUGHTER]
So I'm going to read a few more.
"Elegy with a RIP Shirt Turning into the Wind"
Some days away from me the air turns,
and I pray pistols into my hands,
as if there is a peace that will open up with bullets,
with a "blucka-blucka-blucka" of a hammer's siren.
In the streets the boys play a game they call "throwback."
It is football, every man for himself
as he weaves under the wires above Mississippi Avenue.
The sneakers swinging above his juking body like machetes
are fresh--
Jordans, Air Force 1s, and Chuck Taylors--
singing death songs when the wind blows hard enough.
Touchdowns are as rare as angels,
and when the boy turns his body, the Rest In Peace
shirt slants against the wind.
And there is a moment where he is not weighed down by gravity
when he owns the moment before he crashes into the other boys'
waiting arms and they all look like a dozen mannequins
controlled by the spinning sneaker strings
of the dead boys above them.