I'm going to read one last piece,
and then we can all go home.
Or we can ask questions.
Another question?
No, OK.
It's called the, "Piss of God."
We start with Jesus and end with the "Piss of God."
This is the last piece I read also today at the juvie hall,
and they told me not to have any obscenities,
and I wasn't sure if this was an obscenity or not.
But I went with it.
It was the last reading.
"The Piss of God."
"Sometimes a man falls asleep in the midst
of buttoning his jackets, his fingers
hanging on to the last button.
Sometimes embedded in hot asphalt,
you see a key shined by the soles of pedestrian shoes.
You check your pockets, suddenly worried.
The sidewalk calls using the trick of gravity
to bring you to your knees to close
your eyes to make you sleep.
If there's grass, if you can see it,
each blade catches a sliver of streetlight.
Each blade wants you to hold on.
Face down, you swear you can feel the Earth spin.
Hold tight or you'll spin off into outer space.
Forget about ceilings, about walls, about doors, about keys.
The bread you ate at lunch is already
turning to soil inside you.
Night soil now.
Darkness hovering inside.
Soon your flesh will crumble off you.
Those on their way to work the next morning
will pass your whitened skeleton,
like so many Styrofoam cups bleached perfect.
If not for the rats, you could crawl beneath a bush.
A bush, a bench, a bridge.
The alliterative universe.
Rats too can pass through that needle's eye
to enter heaven, as easily as they pass into a box imagined
into a house.
Houses inside buildings, houses inside tunnels.
Some exist for only a day, some miraculously longer.
This box held a refrigerator.
The refrigerator is in an apartment.
A man is in the box.
Tomorrow, the box will be flattened and tossed.
You've seen the garbageman stomping them down
to fit into the truck.
Wake up in the grass soaking wet.
Dew is the piss of God.
Another bullshit night in suck city, my father mutters.
And then there's the Celtics losing just across town.
Last night, Mackey had a La-Z-Boy set up in rat alley,
watching a television hot-wired into a light pole.
My father stepped into Mackey's living room,
checked out a couple of minutes of play.
Can they still be called the glory days of Byrd?
Step out of your room, settle into a discarded recliner.
Are you inside now, or out?
Position your chair before your television.
Take your walk, find your coffee.
By morning, it will all be gone.
No inside, no outside, no cardboard box, no mansion,
no birth, no death, no container, no contained.
A zen koan, a frickin' riddle.
A garbage truck hauled the TV away.
Another will be put out on the sidewalk tonight.
But a La-Z-Boy, my Lord, maybe not again in this lifetime."
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]