So I pop all over the place in history from the '40s and '30s.
The '50s.
Sometimes, I even show up in the poem in my 13-year-old
or younger guys.
And then I have these other characters.
So I have actual family figures.
And then I have this larger sense
of family in terms of Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald.
And not always sort of heroes of that sort
of unquestionable magnitude.
I've also got people you learn.
Other kinds of [INAUDIBLE] from like OJ Simpson, the boxer Jack
Johnson.
I box now.
So.
And then crazy things that have happened to me in my life.
I was in England.
I used to spend my summers in England.
And I was there, one time you are going to drive
on the other side of the road.
And this is not so good for those of us
from America and Europe.
We forget what to do.
And so, I happened immediately upon this mishap
that had just happened with the bus and an Italian tourist.
And as we were walking away, my friend and I
were kind of stunned.
When she turns to me and she says, 'you're the poet,
you have to write something about this.'
Just like a double-dog dare.
So eventually, I--
"Requiem".
"Sing the mass-- light upon me washing words now
that I am gone.
The sky was a hot, blue sheet the summer breeze
fanned out and over the town.
I could have lived forever under that sky.
Forgetting where I was, I looked left, not right,
crossed into a street and stepped in front
of the bus that ended me.
Will you believe me when I tell you it was beautiful--
my left leg turned to uselessness and my right shoe
flung some distance down the road?
Will you believe me when I tell you I had never been so in love
with anyone as I was, then, with everyone I saw?
The way an age-worn man held his wife's shaking arm,
supporting the weight that seemed to sing
from the heart she clutched.
Knowing her eyes embraced the pile that was me,
he guided her sacked body through the crowd.
And the way one woman began a fast the moment
she looked under the wheel.
I saw her swear off decadence.
I saw her start to pray.
You see, I was so beautiful the woman sent
to clean the street used words like police tape
to keep back a young boy seconds before he
rounded the grisly bumper.
The woman who cordoned the area feared my memory would fly him
through the world on pinions of passion much as,
later, the sight of my awful beauty pulled her down to tears
when she pooled my blood with water
and swiftly, swiftly washed by stains away.