And I'll conclude with a poem we have--
it'll take about five minutes to read--
titled, again, "Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018,"
which begins with an epigraph from Coleridge, who says,
quote, "To see is only a language,"
which is from his poem, "Written During a Temporary Blindness
in the Year of 1799."
"1.
To see is only a language, and I can't speak it today.
They've wrapped a heavy blanket over my face.
The cops deliver the influenza.
But before injection, they need to wait for someone
to fix the central heating.
No one wants to interrogate me until they
fix the central heating.
I chatter with the broken refugees in this prison,
our faces wrapped in darkness.
2.
A list of frozen bodies, a lost list of unclaimed bodies,
a lost list of privatized bodies, a lost list of bodies
they seized, we are the lost list.
But we don't know where they keep us.
3.
The border bisecting the infected--
the border bisecting the infected fumes
of the infested factories, the utopia of statelessness,
the utopia of transience, they tell us
Lake Michigan is the Central America of the Midwest.
They send us here so we can share hepatitis swabs
with dirty immigrants.
Hold on to your DNA, refugee citizens.
The only question about life is, what does it mean to live it?
4.
Financiers selling bodies, speculators
selling blood and sperm, they slink
into the webs of the city.
They tell me I don't have the right
to grieve over my own body.
They tell me to pray and to grieve is illegal.
5.
What did he shout before he massacred the grandmothers?
What did he shout before he massacred the worshippers?
What did he shout before he massacred
the nurses, the silent, praying skeletons?
He was on his way to the river the blood would never reach.
He was on his way to the Nazi meet-up
the blood would never reach.
The stock market just opened.
The exchanged value of a slaughtered Jew
is like the exchanged value of a slaughtered Jew.
If your body is on fire, a private firefighter
will put it out much faster than a state one,
the death of a sensuous lung.
6.
The song of the ram's horn by the river, the early Americans
marched to meet the caravan in the desert.
An authoritative body tells me I can't disembody my body
without embodying the collective bodies' body.
And if I disembody the collective bodies' body,
then I will have to disembody the imagined community's body.
And if I disembody the imagined community's body,
then I will need to ignore the fields of multiple destruction
today.
I dip my finger into a cup of blood
and wish for plagues to destroy the emperor.
I need to destroy the nation state, but when will
I find the time?
7.
The bourgeoisie pay taxes to kill immigrants,
bathe in the cryptocurrency of a bank that will never exist.
8.
The song of atonement at the river sings, pray harder,
and the massacre will go away.
Pray harder, and the massacre will not
turn into another massacre.
Pray harder, and the poor people will become rich people .
Pray harder, and the slaughterer will turn into a butterfly.
Pray harder, and the 30 million white males with guns
will turn into a river of testicles rolling down
the street.
When they repossess my body, my heart will soak in petroleum,
and my mouth will be a baby in a cage,
the poetry of the shattered bone,
and the flame of the human document.
9.
The catastrophe is caressed ad nauseam.
The greased-up multitudes are not
afraid to say the same thing over and over again.
Death leaks from their shoes, and the slaughtered Jews
are like slaughtered Jews.
I dream about returning to a prayer that doesn't exist.
It disappeared yesterday when they assassinated the morning,
and turned our life into spectacle.
10.
You hid behind the soldiers with machine guns
running down the street.
You were praying for plagues and wishing your parents would
come out of the building alive.
The worshippers of the dead trees
knew that where there is a first kill, there will be a second.
Where there is a third kill, there
will be a fourth, a fifth, a 500th.
The anecdote destroys the analysis.
11.
The immigrants split their bodies into communal assets.
To assimilate, they must stand by the river
with a prophylactic angel in their hands,
disguised as a rocketing hedge fund.
In the rupture, in the rubble, in the pathological eye
sockets, in the counter odyssey of the whites of your eyes,
in the parliamentary assault rifle,
the parliamentary machine guns splatter,
the illegal bodies in cages are painted over
by the analytics and mathematics of the hemisphere.
How do you quantify the broken toddlers rolling on the ground?
How do you quantify the murmuring grief
of the Americas?
12.
Marines medicate mothers and mix their milk with mononucleosis.
Millionaires multiply in the machinery of mourning,
manufacturing mausoleums for martyred Marxists and Mercedes.
Middle managers mistake manipulative merchants
for munificent moralists.
A military massacre on the municipal motorway
is like a military massacre on the municipal motorway.
Metaphysical mayors mediate the mythology of mystical markets
while monitoring the murders of migrants.
My mouth is filled with words."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]