Summary from the--
I'm gonna read this poem that I never read.
And partly you know, I like this book.
But I think I'm biased.
But I'm always, I'm frequently now confronted with the reality
that a lot of people actually haven't read this book
because it's a few poems that I think challenge
the dominant perception of what people
think about the war on drugs.
And either they've read the book and haven't read this poem,
or they haven't read the book at all.
But it's always interesting to be in a situation
where you feel like the only way you can make sure somebody
hears a specific poem in your book is if you read it to them.
And so this one's a challenge because it's a bit long,
but I'm, we'll see what happens.
"The Invention of Crack".
One.
Dark Alliance.
Crack smoked over this backdrop: CIA seal,
Contras, so much heavy weight.
How birds fly?
How millions turn into guerilla props:
AK 47s, and everything else.
White smoke.
Rocks.
The dead and dying.
Gary Webb's tale of two horrors: contra and crack.
Mr. Speaker, what is most frightening about crack
is that it has made cocaine widely available.
Mr. Speaker, I am afraid that the crack epidemic will only
get worse.
Parenthetical, the speaker is black, close parenthetical.
I wish to bring to the attention of our colleagues
an article, extra potent cocaine use rising sharply
among teenagers.
Parenthetical.
This is the motherfucker predicting, Dilulio.
Close parenthetical.
Confirms what many of us in the Congress
who have the responsibility of reviewing federal drug abuse
policy have known for some time.
Parenthetical, niggas will pay.
Close parenthetical.
The availability of crack cocaine
in its purest state at low street prices
will only expand the abuse of cocaine nationwide.
This Black man says crack will ruin.
Senator Black Elect say scourge and scourges
and look behind the words and you
know he knew there is a prison for them.
This post Rockefeller, after Carmona
got laced with a life sentence for $100 worth of heroin.
Ain't many black folks in Congress.
Keep saying Reagan did it.
Black man say Reagan did it.
Reagan say look at the paper, the bodies in the street.
Rangel says scourge and you vote for him again and again
and again, and the pen is still filled with the bodies.
Ain't no conspiracy here.
Hand to hand scared him.
Black man watching the projects turn into a war zone.
Probably thought if no one notices the carnage, he should.
Probably thought if no one notices
the zombies in the street, he should.
Don't tell me he trafficked in The New Jim Crow too.
Rangel said scourge all these years, all these years
and the bodies in prison, and we don't
stop counting but I know what he told the papers.
We stopped counting.
Stopped counting how many babies lost their mothers to the pool
of smoke running from aluminum.
We had stopped counting.
Mr. Senator was out to ruin ours,
it seems except he called it about.
You think we counted our lost?
Lost pounds?
Lost brothers?
All the women who bartered?
All the men who bartered?
All the things they lost?
The newest scourge on the streets
is a frightening low cost substance called crack.
This form of cocaine, which uses freebase,
has been proved lethal time and again,
and it's responsible for an alarming
number of episodes of death and injury in recent weeks.
Parenthetical.
When it's heroin and it's in a rural town, we won't say this.
Close parenthetical.
Two.
Nickel bag, dimebag, eight ball--
we invented a way for brothers to be good at math.
Call me crackhead, call me fiend,
but I know my daddy's name is what I tell the young boys even
as they wave me on to the spot where a kid my son's age passes
out the rocks that will make me see God one more time.
Jesus, some of us still be praying
with aluminum between our lips.
All our music reduced to something clever
to say about dope.
Call it white lady.
Call me snowman.
Say I move avalanches.
I drought the city.
From the 1st to the 5th I got it all back.
Crown me rap star if I ain't a hustler what you call that.
I was just trying to feed my babies.
These motherfuckers called this shit
these fools saying classic.
Move weight.
Fly birds.
Call me Ricky Ross.
Call me dopeman, pusherman.
He who moved bricks.
Move that dope.
This, all of this, the abyss where men go to die,
and the rest of America goes to watch.
Where Rangel at?
Yeah, I know you laughing, and they still saying
whitey did it.
I've been had my money on the man that
stays in the office, that gets in office,
that suits up to go prosecute, that suits up to go defend.
I say they did it.
What?
Watch when the city went to ruins.
Inheritance ain't nothing but memory.
When a mayor and a reporter smoking too,
while we're the only ones in jail?
Where all those men were dreamed?
They keep saying in the 80s a Smokey, Teddy, Luther would
have crooned to a crack pipe.
We pray that thou will grant, O Lord,
whatever will that will bury what brought smoke,
crystalline, white rocks to our streets.
Rayful.
Freeway Ricky.
Supreme.
Everyone wanting to be Escobar.
A proliferation of bodies enlarged by cameras.
Philargyrist: lover of money, antecedent
to Andre three stacks, to all those pockets full of stones.
They say where the Earth has no water there is a man craving
the shining glimmer of a nickel, or the ragged end
of a pipe in their mouths.
1980 something.
Corposant and corpse.
Or fuck your hearse.
Three.
It takes a nation of millions to hold us back?
Well they got that.
We got that too.
Hands around our throats.
Before you suffocate your own self, father forgive.
And so the penitentiaries are barrels
full of children running away from Jake, Bodine, 5-0,
all these names for the same dance.
On the run.
And watch when the researchers come, notebooks in hands,
writing about the dispossessed.
About the clean and dirty.
Their idioms of death and whatnot.
King me motherfucka, they say when the research drops.
Expert on the Negro problem.
They become Oracle and insight, and we got all the dead bodies
around us.
Say so many people died one year,
the district was worse than Vietnam.
Per capita they say.
Per capital, meaning all the capitals in the world
was better to be in than here where
Sam did go to college no matter what the news say.
And he came back and paid rent like all these good folks
with their dogs and shit do now.
Talk about the victor writes history.
The Reagan era, the cocaine era, than boys from Dunbar
could hoop is what I mean to say.
All the dope gets in the way though.
Me remembering that story a bag at a time
and ain't none of them kids get high.
My uncle caught touchdowns for Bladensburg high school,
where his story.
My aunt ain't get high, my mom, where their story?
All their history buried in the narrative of the shooter,
or the one pitching them kilos.
We buried a nation inside the lungs that filled with smoke,
and the smoke smothers the nation,
and the nation is the small child crying in the corner,
and the barrels are filled with crabs.
Joseph E Lowery, president of the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, urges blacks to turn in drug pushers
regardless of race.
Parenthetical, he knows blacks only know black drug pushers
and drug dealers, but so what.
Close parenthetical.
We are devastated spiritually and emotionally
by what crack and other drugs are doing to our people.
Parenthetical, not as much as we are devastated by racism.
Close parenthetical.
He says drugs represent the new lynch
mob that is more effectively killing our people
than the old lynch mob.
Parenthetically.
Close parenthetical.
Always that same hurt, you think a man
don't know what a high can do?
Flattened an entire city block a few guns did.
I tell my shadow we made it all possible.
You know getting high ain't the move,
but ask someone who's been there,
shit feels like coming for days, that's
what they said about heroin.
Crack, it feels like God has dropped the piece of heaven
behind your eyelids.
After that, all you want is to be that close to an angel
again.