All right, leave it to a man named Blake.
Get the job done. the poetry job done, you know.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm completely thrilled to be here.
I can't believe how many awesome people are here
in this town in Tucson.
Poetry town, Poetry capital, poetry Metropolis, poetry
desert.
I'm just thrilled and I just want
to launch into this while I'm kinda high on ginger ale.
[LAUGHTER]
So the first poem I'm going to read is from this book,
but it's also in the awesome spork book that they made.
You totally have to check that out at the punk press Spork.
But it's also in my new book "Percussion Grenade"
and it's called "King Prion."
And it's a series poem so it's going
to go on for a little while.
And what it's about is so Prion diseases
are like mad cow disease.
There's these diseases that you get when you basically
cannibalize yourself.
So when a cow eats cow, it gets mad cow disease.
And when we eat the hamburger, we get it too.
Awesome.
And mad cow disease works by sending a protein
into your brain, and then the protein in your brain
freaks out and doesn't work anymore either.
It's like peer pressure from that protein
to not work anymore.
[LAUGHTER]
So I became obsessed with this and interested in it.
And also I thought how much of our current life
works that way, like the internet, for example.
It just gets into your brain and make jimmys with your brain
and makes it not work the way it used to.
But sometimes your brain starts working in radiant new ways.
And medications, definitely do that,
contaminants that you don't even know how
it's jimmying with your system.
I got obsessed with these and how they all
seem to be working together like assault but also change you.
For me, the name of that being that assaults and changes you.
Art might be another example of something that works that way,
poetry is King Prion.
So these poems are about King Prion.
And every time I make this weird high pitched noise
at the beginning, that's like the spirit coming in to me.
That's like King Prion taking over, sort of a voodoo move,
OK?
So don't get scared.
It'll end.
I won't go on for 20 minutes in this high pitched noise.
So here we go.
And if I hope I don't--
I'll try not to break this also.
[LAUGHTER]
Also thank you so much for having me.
Thanks.
All right, so "King Prion."
And I need a little of this guy.
Here we go.
Hoowoo!
Laying an array of pixels, fat simulated proteins.
Looks just like nutrition, acts just like an avatar.
I just want to give my body to a net of guarine,
ginkgo balboa, azatine, melamine, camphobacter
phylacter nicotine, which hung like neuron-nectar in a cell
net of vatic coughdropped hairball
tells the future of neural center,
where the straight lines hopped like a hairline fracture
on a bender.
Jumps a Mulholland retaining wall
and crashes the crinkled Vale of food for thought.
Fruit for monkeys in a barrel.
One fruit per monkey for a total of 47 monkey days,
for a total of 12 hours at a clip.
The go home and feed the baby milk of it.
That man is a mouth chased by a ghosts around a rain- slicked
hairpin off a cliff in.
And now I paus to remember how art was a silver paper molded
to the ceiling, where you cut your hair for your rebirth
as Fata Androgyana the scissor sister who slits where she
goes into, cuts where she cuts.
But this machine makes its need louder
and invites me into its duct.
Unlike the baby sleeping on the other edge of power,
eyes rolled, mouth shrunk shut on powers, earthly sinks
and shunts.