This is a longer one.
But it's that same principle of the line between beholder
and participant, I think.
So it's called "Coffin for Head of State."
And it's broken into parts.
And the parts, if you were to look in the book,
are songs from Fela Kuti, as is "Coffin for Head of State."
But I'm just going to read it straight through.
And this is another one.
I haven't probably read it since you heard it,
however long ago that was, and if you
remember that in Massachusetts.
So let's see if I can read it.
"Coffin for Head of State."
Inside the coffin was a tomb.
Inside the mouth of the bullhorn was a tomb.
Inside the stems of the violets--
tombs.
Inside the blue shawl of the afternoon and of the dusk,
inside the words awe, freedom, territory, fatigue.
In one village, I came to a woman shaped like a bird
and was given a knife as long as a feather.
In another, a woman spit a curse to break me
like an egg, its sweetness running between my fingers
like something the body makes.
I was born in the year of the war between wars.
I was born to a religion I thought
could not hold me ransom, to sermons walking
on the back of the wind.
I was pulled from death's pocket and cradled in its hand.
My father was the sunlight now.
But I couldn't understand a word he was saying.
When his teeth were removed and tossed
glittering along the tracks of the trains,
I was quiet as the indicted.
I, myself, was the music I lacked.
In each village, when I tried to tell them
I was American, amen, amen, amen, amen, amen, amen,
spilled like ash from my mouth.
And they knew what it meant.
Everywhere, I was made to dance like a man carrying his head
before they cast me out.
To be holy, to be united, to be untied,
could I ask or answer you?
I would be three things at once, I said to the coffin.
To be uneyed, unheavied, and alive,
I said, to be the light on all the disappearing, words,
to be burning and washed away, to be lit inside.
I walked, I walked, I walked.
I was not noble, heroic, compassionate,
holding the shadow of a name in the world I'd
seen the scalp torched by the way things used to be,
including the smoke rising from the mind of a wing,
including the hair burned off its ability to dream.
I carried a child's imagination, the uses
of money, the philosophies of grace,
the paradoxes of revenge.
I carried a prayer book with words as small
as the screws in the glasses of the blind.
I carried bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad
things, and the weight in my teeth made my teeth ache.
For Jesus Christ our Lord, for the grace of the Almighty Lord,
for the wound and the bitter spit
of the accused, for the scar resting against my wrist
for the rest of my life, because what I feared was in me,
was in me.
I wanted to lie still in the body like a knife.
What I liked about its weight was what I liked about the sky,
as red as the beginning of the day
and as the end, the gravity that was
guilt or history, the darkness that was smoke or a cloud,
the burning that was washed away.
In one village, vultures clapped their beaks at me.
They clapped their wings like the silly flags of providence,
twisting against themselves.
The body was soft.
The body was what I bore.
The body was what I ate.
Inside the red of a feeling and irrevocably so,
inside the blood, inside the yolk which is a warning,
inside the ghost, the feel of oaths and conviction,
the contracts of the state going to business
and busying the breath, the eyes basked
in the aesthetics of blindness, I almost
described the leaves shining on their bones and the snakes
roosting in their sheaths to the coffin,
and the valley where all the headstones were smoldering.
But there was nothing left to be said.
So I said it again and again.
I carried it on my back like a man with one wing.
I carried it against my chest like a door with no housing,
with the blood, which was its contrition,
with the iron, which was its name, with the hunger, which
was its belonging.
I was born with my fingers on the latch of a coffin,
hot with the sunlight spilling on its face,
locked like a window in a building on fire.
For Jesus Christ our Lord or against him,
for the grace of the Almighty, my coffin the moth house,
my coffin with no message or lover, my coffin
cooled by stars spilling on its face, my coffin the mouth.
My body could have fit inside its body
and drifted downstream to the center of the earth.
After my mother sang the only hymn she knew,
she tore her black dress open the way one tears a scab
from its address.
And I saw the skinny knife she kept
hidden between her breasts.
I am not in the village filled with the prophets.
I'm feeling elegiac for our cataclysms,
the blood in the yolk when the egg breaks,
the grief stripped of its shell.
I'm filled with the hallowness of holiness and breath.
I am inside the village, reddened by readiness,
inside the word tear and tear and fatigue,
inside the terror which makes territory evaporate, where
the sunlight braiding my scalp is on my mind.
He dead, yeah, now, now, now, now, now, the villagers
sang, when I tried to tell them I was alive.
He dead, yeah, now, now, now, now, now, the villagers
sang, as I carried my coffin toward them.
He dead, yeah, now, now, now, the villagers
sang, as I carried my coffin away.
[APPLAUSE]