All right.
John, do you want to close us out with a final poem?
And then I may have one last question for all of you
before we close the circle.
It sounds good.
Well, because I took up so much time with my own poem,
and because Hanif has opened the door
and gave me permission to do this, I will end.
But I'll end with some OPP.
I'll end with a poem by Etheridge Knight.
Oh, yeah.
When we think of prison and poetry,
his name has to be in the conversation.
In many ways, he's the patron saint to a lot of us,
but a lot of the people who are doing this kind of work
and thinking about these things.
So I'm going to read a poem of his called
"For Freckle-Faced Gerald."
Now you take ol Rufus.
He beat drums, was free and funky under the arms,
fucked white girls, jumped off a bridge,
and thought nothing of the sacrilege.
He copped out, and he was over 21.
Take Gerald.
16 years hadn't even done a good job on his voice.
He didn't even know how to talk tough
or how to hide the glow of life before he
was thrown in as "pigmeat" for the buzzards to eat.
Gerald, who had no memory or hope of copper hot lips,
or firm up thrusting thighs to reinforce his flow,
let tall walls and buzzards change the course of his river
from south to north.
No safety in numbers, like back on the block.
Two's aplenty.
Three?
Definitely not.
Four?
You're all Muslims.
Five?
You were planning a race riot.
Plus, Gerald could never quite win with his precise speech
and innocent grin, the trust and fists of the young Black cats.
Gerald, sun-kissed 10,000 times on the nose and cheeks,
didn't stand a chance, didn't even
know that the loss of his balls had
been plotted years in advance by wiser and bigger buzzards
than those who now hover above his track and at night lights
upon his back.
Thank you, John.
That was beau-- Etheridge Knight is also like one of those poets
that I think really opened personally my eyes as a poet
to, oh, these are all the people that I know in my neighborhood,
and you can write about them, and that you could write about
prison, and you could do it in a way where it's not--
it doesn't become like a spectacle.
Right.
It's like a real story, a real human story--
Absolutely.
--like a visualization of what happens.
I think we're going to go ahead and close for tonight there.
And I just want to thank everyone
who is tuning in to watch this, and I
want to thank the poets for being
so present not only in the creation of the work,
but also in the reading of the work and their attention
to the issue of the carceral state.
So thank you everyone.