WEBVTT

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So those are from A
Crown for Gumecindo.

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This next poem was actually
commissioned from my city

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when I was poet
laureate of this city

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and it's called Ars Politica.

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And I wrote it because when I
was poet laureate of the city,

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one of the questions I got
often was how do you do it?

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How do you-- like how
do you write poems?

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how do you make poems?

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And I was like, man.

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Like, I did a whole lifetime
to explain that to you,

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but this was my response
to that question.

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Ars Politica: How To Make
Art, in praise of the working

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artists of San Antonio.

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You must start small as
our mothers were small,

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our fathers too, small.

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In a pillow case whip-stitched
with roses or in an old coffee

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can, collect your abuelo's
teeth, assure them

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you will not bury
them near the bones

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of the dog that froze the
winter that dogs froze.

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Carry the teeth
under your tongue.

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Let them root there.

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This is how you
will learn to speak.

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Be ready to cough up songs,
corridos plucked first

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by a revolutionary whose gun
smoke you wear in your hair.

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The songs will be
new in your throat.

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We are always beginning.

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We are always beginning again.

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You cannot be afraid
to unhinge the jaw.

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Let the sun blister your mouth.

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Know thirst.

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Cast your own eyes from their
sockets like a confettied

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April that you will know the
bloom and battle of flowers.

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Let your ribs draw across
the ribs of another.

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El canto del violín.

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Let your fingers dance.

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El guitarrón.

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Needle or pen, brushed
oil, machete or drum,

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leather, cilantro, stomp--

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be patient in the tooling.

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The weaving of experience 100,
500, 10,000 years to here.

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Love-making in the cotton and
nopal, battle lines and color

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lines, birthing in the
huts, in the casitas

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under a grove of
mesquite and huizache,

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and, too, lynchings and
genocide in the feathery strands

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of our DNA that move our
hands to do the work.

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Trust your hands
know the work even

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if you do not know the work.

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You do not speak for the dead.

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The dead speak for you.

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