I'm going to read one more from the book
just because I talked to my son today,
and I promised him I would read this one.
And then I'll go back to poems from the project.
"My son, budding dreadhead, has taken a break
from obsessively twisting and waxing his naps,
swelling his delts, and busting rhymes
with no aim, backbeat, or future beyond the common room.
For want of a plumper canteen, the child
has laid claim to a jailhouse vocation.
I'm the writer, Mama, he tells me.
That's what I'm known for in here.
In my kitchen, clutching the receiver,
I want to laugh, because my son has always
been the writer, muttering witness
to the underbelly, his rebel heart
overthumping, his bladed lines peppered
with ready-market gangster swerve
and cringing in awe of themselves.
I want to laugh, but I must commit to my focus.
I must be typical, single, black,
with an 18-to-30-year-old male child behind bars.
How deftly I have learned the up/back of that tiring Watusi.
I guess it's a poem.
You can throw it away if you want.
And oh, I'd ache at what he'd done, the bottoms he'd found,
the clutch he claimed on what refused to be held,
the queries scraped from surface.
What are you, child, I'd whisper as I read.
Could there be a dream just temporarily deferred
wallowing in those drooping denims and triple-X sweats,
could there be a poet wrapped tight
against the world in those swaddling clothes?
He was the writer then, but now, reluctant resident
of the Middlesex County House of Corrections, he is the writer,
sanctioned by the baddest of badasses
because he has trumpeted the power of twisting
verb and noun not only to say things, but to get shit.
They paying me to write love letters to their ladies.
I mean, I write poems if they want that.
This big musclehead brother everybody be sweating even
asked me to write a letter to his mama on his birthday.
They call him Scribe.
They bring him their imploded dreams,
letters from their women-in-waiting tired
of waiting.
On deadline, he spins impossible sugar
onto the precise lines of legal pads,
pens June/moon dripping enough to melt a b-girl's hard heart.
He drops to scarred knees, moans and whimpers
in stilted verse, coaxing last ink
from a passed-around ballpoint, making it wail.
Please, please, babygirl, don't be talking
about not waiting out my time.
Only five years left.
That ain't much.
Hey Scribe, Scribe, Scribe, hook me up, man.
I ain't got no answer for this shit she be talking.
Tattooed in riotous colors, they circle him in the common room,
whispering to him under the surface of their reputations.
I got a job for you, Scribe, got a job.
When the letters are crafted just right,
copied over and over and edited for the real,
the customers stumble through the aloud reading of them,
scared of their own new voices.
Too dazzled to demand definition,
they scrunch scarred foreheads and whistle
through gold caps at the three-syllable kickverbs.
I'm going to trust you, they tell my son.
I'm going to have to trust you on this.
They don't want this softness.
They don't want it.
You know, Scribe, Scribe, damn, damn, man, this shit sings!
You blessed, brother, you blessed.
I mean, I don't know--
I don't know what you're saying, man, but it sure sound good.
So I'm going to trust you on this, man.
I got to trust you on this.
Then they copy the words in their own hand
and send spun silk shoutouts to the freewalking world,
hoping that a disillusioned girlfriend or a neglected
mother or a wife-in-waiting tired of waiting
will slit open the envelope and feel a warm repentant soul
spill out into her hands.
And I must admit, as a fellow poet, I envy my son,
this being necessary.
Think of it.
Which of us would refuse to try on the first face
of a killer, our life teetering on every line?
Wouldn't we want to craft a new front for everyone just once,
to rewrite one moment of a life story,
to beg for mercy on behalf of someone who has never
known life on his knees?
And at the end of our flowery betrayal,
that white-heat moment of no sound.
In the steamy pocket of it, we'd need
one person to rise up slow, full of spit and menace, to say, OK.
OK, then.
I'm going to trust you on that one.
I'm going to have to--
I'm going to have to trust you on that."
[APPLAUSE]