WEBVTT

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This is a longer one.

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But it's that same principle
of the line between beholder

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and participant, I think.

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So it's called "Coffin
for Head of State."

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And it's broken into parts.

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And the parts, if you
were to look in the book,

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are songs from Fela Kuti, as
is "Coffin for Head of State."

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But I'm just going to
read it straight through.

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And this is another one.

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I haven't probably read
it since you heard it,

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however long ago
that was, and if you

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remember that in Massachusetts.

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So let's see if I can read it.

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"Coffin for Head of State."

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Inside the coffin was a tomb.

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Inside the mouth of the
bullhorn was a tomb.

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Inside the stems
of the violets--

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tombs.

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Inside the blue shawl of the
afternoon and of the dusk,

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inside the words awe,
freedom, territory, fatigue.

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In one village, I came to
a woman shaped like a bird

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and was given a knife
as long as a feather.

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In another, a woman
spit a curse to break me

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like an egg, its sweetness
running between my fingers

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like something the body makes.

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I was born in the year
of the war between wars.

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I was born to a
religion I thought

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could not hold me ransom,
to sermons walking

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on the back of the wind.

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I was pulled from death's
pocket and cradled in its hand.

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My father was the sunlight now.

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But I couldn't understand
a word he was saying.

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When his teeth were
removed and tossed

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glittering along the
tracks of the trains,

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I was quiet as the indicted.

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I, myself, was the
music I lacked.

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In each village, when
I tried to tell them

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I was American, amen, amen,
amen, amen, amen, amen,

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spilled like ash from my mouth.

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And they knew what it meant.

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Everywhere, I was made to dance
like a man carrying his head

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before they cast me out.

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To be holy, to be
united, to be untied,

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could I ask or answer you?

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I would be three things at
once, I said to the coffin.

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To be uneyed,
unheavied, and alive,

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I said, to be the light on
all the disappearing, words,

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to be burning and washed
away, to be lit inside.

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I walked, I walked, I walked.

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I was not noble,
heroic, compassionate,

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holding the shadow of
a name in the world I'd

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seen the scalp torched by
the way things used to be,

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including the smoke rising
from the mind of a wing,

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including the hair burned
off its ability to dream.

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I carried a child's
imagination, the uses

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of money, the
philosophies of grace,

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the paradoxes of revenge.

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I carried a prayer book
with words as small

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as the screws in the
glasses of the blind.

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I carried bad, bad, bad, bad,
bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad

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things, and the weight in
my teeth made my teeth ache.

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For Jesus Christ our Lord, for
the grace of the Almighty Lord,

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for the wound and
the bitter spit

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of the accused, for the scar
resting against my wrist

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for the rest of my life,
because what I feared was in me,

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was in me.

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I wanted to lie still in
the body like a knife.

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What I liked about its weight
was what I liked about the sky,

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as red as the
beginning of the day

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and as the end, the
gravity that was

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guilt or history, the darkness
that was smoke or a cloud,

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the burning that
was washed away.

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In one village, vultures
clapped their beaks at me.

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They clapped their wings like
the silly flags of providence,

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twisting against themselves.

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The body was soft.

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The body was what I bore.

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The body was what I ate.

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Inside the red of a
feeling and irrevocably so,

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inside the blood, inside
the yolk which is a warning,

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inside the ghost, the feel
of oaths and conviction,

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the contracts of the
state going to business

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and busying the
breath, the eyes basked

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in the aesthetics of
blindness, I almost

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described the leaves shining
on their bones and the snakes

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roosting in their
sheaths to the coffin,

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and the valley where all the
headstones were smoldering.

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But there was nothing
left to be said.

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So I said it again and again.

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I carried it on my back
like a man with one wing.

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I carried it against my chest
like a door with no housing,

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with the blood, which
was its contrition,

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with the iron, which was its
name, with the hunger, which

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was its belonging.

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I was born with my fingers
on the latch of a coffin,

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hot with the sunlight
spilling on its face,

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locked like a window
in a building on fire.

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For Jesus Christ our
Lord or against him,

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for the grace of the Almighty,
my coffin the moth house,

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my coffin with no message
or lover, my coffin

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cooled by stars spilling on
its face, my coffin the mouth.

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My body could have
fit inside its body

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and drifted downstream to
the center of the earth.

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After my mother sang
the only hymn she knew,

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she tore her black dress
open the way one tears a scab

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from its address.

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And I saw the skinny
knife she kept

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hidden between her breasts.

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I am not in the village
filled with the prophets.

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I'm feeling elegiac
for our cataclysms,

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the blood in the yolk
when the egg breaks,

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the grief stripped of its shell.

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I'm filled with the hallowness
of holiness and breath.

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I am inside the village,
reddened by readiness,

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inside the word tear
and tear and fatigue,

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inside the terror which makes
territory evaporate, where

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the sunlight braiding
my scalp is on my mind.

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He dead, yeah, now, now,
now, now, now, the villagers

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sang, when I tried to
tell them I was alive.

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He dead, yeah, now, now,
now, now, now, the villagers

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sang, as I carried my
coffin toward them.

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He dead, yeah, now,
now, now, the villagers

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sang, as I carried
my coffin away.

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[APPLAUSE]