[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Thanks for coming everybody.
And thanks Rodney for that.
It's a lot of people here.
I just spent the afternoon in the juvenile detention
facility, which I recommend all of you to go visit sometime.
I'm sure probably some of you have been there,
from the looks of it.
But, no, these are really amazing kids there.
I read from the memoir and we had
questions in between each one.
And there were a lot of questions.
And they had really intense, insightful questions.
They saw things in what I had written that--
they would ask a question and I would
do that whole Socratic thing and just sort of say so,
what do you think about that?
And so they would get into it.
There was a passage about raking leaves.
And these guys like--
guys and girls, they lock them all up.
They would see things.
They were talking about raking the leaves.
Like 10 different kids raised their hands
and each had a different interpretation of it.
It's really quite beautiful.
I really recommend going there and reading your poetry
sometime, and it's quite intense.
So I'm going to read some work.
I'm going to start with a newish poem.
It's called "Jesus Knew."
Is that for me?
No.
Is that a cell phone?
Yeah.
OK.
I think we should just all turn our cell phones on really.
[LAUGHTER]
It's going up there somewhere.
[CHUCKLES]
"Jesus Knew."
You might think all my poems because Rodney read one
about Jesus also.
That was written a long time ago.
But this is yet another Jesus poem.
10 years later, Jesus comes back.
"Jesus Knew."
"Unlike you and I, Jesus knew he'd die.
Some days a headache woke him.
It lingered, nothing terrible, but the word
hung around his temples like this soul
everyone wants but can't find.
Jesus knew he'd die.
He just didn't know how.
And that bothered him sometimes.
And then he'd do one of his little tricks.
What the hell, didn't hurt anyone.
Didn't make anyone disappear forever.
But the trick stopped working.
He forgot why he did them and what for.
He confused a story about a guy named Jesus
with a story about a father he never knew.
And it all began to hang like a moth-eaten coat pulled out
of a trunk on shaky days.
Hey, let's return to the scene of the fucking tragedy.
At least we all know how it turns out instead
of this endless uncertainty.
Hey, let's sell our souls a few more times.
No one's really counting--
those little papers you trade for your sins,
what do you call them?
Anyone?
No?--
Anyway, Jesus this, Jesus that, God of nickel, God of dime.
Right, the real Jesus, he was lost.
He walked into the desert.
Not far really.
His friends, his disciples, he told them he'd come back.
Like us, he said this every time he left.
But Jesus never said wait, never pointed to the sky,
never claimed he'd rise again, never
asked us to eat his flesh.
Jesus never asked anything as far as I can tell.
He got tired every day.
And then slept, sometimes OK, sometimes unbearable.
The dreams, the father pointing a finger at everyone.
A finger we can't even look at."