[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Yes, "A Palace of Pearls" is actually one long poem.
And the poems are written without any punctuation.
So I'll try to read some, pause, and then resume.
They were written during a recent monsoon season
right here in town, and many of the settings reflect that.
So it's just a pleasure to be able to read this
to the hometown crowd in the old pueblo.
Thank you for being here.
The poems begin literally in my own backyard,
watching the lightning storm commence in the distance,
talking to my dead father, and thinking about life.
"A Palace of Pearls."
"Lightning lights the moon's shroud.
The surface of my body is excited, like sharp stabs
of emotion in love for whose art, the sun is God.
Tonight, the senses spring from the soul as once was thought.
A brief release of something unseen, then enlightenment,
like a gas lamp struck.
Embarking on a long weekend alone,
a long week, a season, a year, another year father
trying to pierce the dark.
Thinking is only ever provisional.
This is what I think now that we're both alone.
I can't remember enough.
I make shit up.
Our time together is now a feeling.
And all my thinking about you, the flicker of event.
By all accounts, sketchy, lest I make too much of it.
Lost just in time, nothing serious.
On my own reconnaissance, some admire me.
Some feel sorry.
I've spent most of my life thinking art
would make sense of it.
A foot soldier seized in sight of his own squadron.
I'm going to see what I can see whenever it flashes.
In the night sky, fighter jets practice.
Won't their metals attract lightning?
They appear not to move.
Jesus!
The shadow leaks out of the thing like a fluid
but has no relation to real shadow,
perfect and perfectly unreflective.
Is it bloody?
I'll call it an accident.
That way, there can be no relief,
no foreboding, all event.
No one will be responsible, least of all.
Do you know how long it's been since a moral choice presented
itself and the wrong choice was made?
Not two minutes.
Why is it not quiet between lightning and thunder?
As if someone were asking, 'Do you have other articulable
feelings?
If so, express them now.'
Tragedy ensues with a laser blast from the cockpit.
The dangled finger of God makes contact.
Please call for several thousand physicians quickly.
I've tried to write when I haven't
been emotionally crippled.
It seems there's no right world for it.
I've been a coward.
I said no when I could have said yes.
Perhaps it's as simple as everyone
learning to read and write.
This is a sinister time for the country, dark political plots.
The poets have become the asses of the aristocrats.
We have our secrets."