Speaking of what this kid could never say,
I'm going to read the long poem from April on Olympia.
It's my homage to Allen Ginsberg and to Allen Ginsberg's Howl,
which I read when I was about 14 years old, and saw him.
I lived in-- grew up in San Jose and would go to San Francisco
to see him.
So yeah, it's an homage.
It's long.
It's Howl, 2022.
"Destination Anywhere," after Allen Ginsberg--
I have watched the best souls of my nation crumpled
in foil against the crumbling brick, barefaced of ivy,
yanked out, cranked out, yodeling their terror
through the cop streets, battered blind of ambition
and terrorless.
One nation, divided under God, in the misunderstanding states
of America, some faraway sea-salt past flaring,
a tattered flag's last gleaming.
Blood on the street!
Look at the blood on the street, they
shout at the boarded up ministries of destiny,
while Destiny, a girl with no face, is pregnant with horror.
The faces!
Have you ever seen such drunken blue on your blue TV screens?
Nothing is ever yellow but the dead to the poor.
The poor lose wits.
The ocean grows vast with their fears.
They have no more hands in which to relieve
their thirst of themselves, no more feet with which to run.
They are light.
They levitate, snagged on the thought of themselves
at last, the start to the blackening aid.
Follow them, the ones still rowing ashore chained
to the metal or gold.
The streets full of gold, the death markets are busy,
all the engines, their minds at full throttle,
while someone is locked in there, erased and foreign.
Oh, I know you don't know this, they moan in the night.
Their shopping carts rattle, tattle
to the busy hum of the burning computers, inside,
the core dream of freedom ringing in their shot-out ears.
On, freedom!
On past the debilitating, on past the commodity
cheese-fed generations of waste, the telemarketers of addiction,
faces more Indian than not.
The not in the shadows, calling to us
under the mystery tree and their cattle, faces demand.
Their tobaccoless lung and coffee-stained faces
demand more longing fear in blue.
The trees!
Why must we level?
Why must we murder the long summer, the vision of one,
the plan, the disaster, the revision of the summit over?
All we are is all.
All we can is a long division of over.
The call and response is overdue,
overpaid to some else, some same destination,
some crossroads, some X on the map to the heart of the matter.
What is the matter with you, catgut
of your sawed-off tongue?
Don't you know who you are?
The pallbearers, the Kaddish speakers, quorum of one,
for you, the you, you speak, fleshless and pure.
We know what we speak.
The dead know well.
We speak to your quarry of one, to the fish
in your belly drinking your spittle, the devein divine
unto the night into kingdom come,
some lost longing, sour trudging,
the war done, some lost languages
trailing behind with their bleeding teats,
trudging nigh on the white horse in a chant and fire.
Some long into it.
Some show some slow download to what do you,
had the speed and software been true.
There is a place that mater's sick between the arms,
the bruised hip and less the lip, some full mouth
filing, some shutting up, but not
to say there will never be enough words of love
for their tattered remains.
What remains?
They stay in vermilion sunset but don't
know that word or its meaning.
Flashing the maw, they loss for no one, for no one knows them.
They talk to shoes searching for pennies, some slot to pick,
some farthing to travel to.
But it's a long good-bye, and it's the wrong day to go.
And the banks are closed to crowd at river's way
to those who walk.
The shadows on the goddamned Golden Bridge
know the goddamned way, facing home on a long dare,
love gone long.
Always laughing, their speech lacking syllables,
they speak gibberish, but it's OK.
No one's listening.
Always longing, their hearts in their beer-cupped hands,
the ones they still have stuffed deep in their empty,
they speak for themselves.
They have a long row to hoe, counting
on North for fishes, broken grammar,
the loathing of their constant labor, their arduous loving.
They are all about themselves, stumbling.
The day is a dare in the malls of the dogs
who look in smudged windows at the shows of tomorrow
but do not see them or speak our language, dry
as it is with gravel.
They are mute.
Their slack jaws are full of stuff, stuck eggs.
They get away with it, too.
The ones we don't shoot get beaten.
They kick away and just get beaten
until they are shot up with it.
The horror!
The horror we speak, but it has no referent to the yearless
earless.
I have known the far-off best minds,
the lines of spittle oozing down their noses
like from the mummified tannery janitor who
works all day for a dime, allergic to peaches,
whose hands are red though their skins are black.
They write poetry to each other in the muted dark,
there in their curtainless windows, revealing their hide.
They speak to no one, frantically pumping
Ganesha's tusk into their loin.
There, they are certain.
They duckwalk, zigzag in their flopping shoes,
in their flopping soles, their mouths
pursed in a circular O, the silos of mystery
sealed from their kiss.
Their souls are dingy damage in the light.
The light!
I have seen the light.
I have seen them.
They speak, but it wasn't at us, not we, not the indivisible.
They walk the waking streets, reeking of popcorn
and white chocolate, the poop on the street
ubiquitous and chalky.
They scatter shot easily.
Their minds have been elsewhere.
It's all they know of flushing, now flashing,
the back-up slapping, the little Brown girl begging
for coin again to sell the painted rock,
its perfect rows chipped off in the fall.
That girl is me.
That woman never recovered waiting for a man
to take her away to some pain, save of the heart's delight,
some valley of craw.
Lo, that I might see you, they pray
to each other in the red alleys of the demeaning seats.
They live where they can.
She never recovered from that man, the velvet trauma,
frightened by a child in the street,
her good red coat flapping in the rain
like the winds of butterfly, the anger of nice on her face.
She wasn't afraid of me.
She feared her love who led her away, nameless and vivid.
Why?
Why did she never reason with me, a direct child, an urchin,
a dickens of a Dickens, a Dickinsonian edge to it
all and everything?
Everything settles.
A woman alone is unnerving.
She is unnerved, that woman, stripped like a shrimp for what
passes for time.
She is still afraid, marred forever by my much,
never to repair the rose and the sorrow.
At the dock, the dim-lit reeking,
my beauty sat in gum-stuck theaters
rocking around the clock.
The mice are asleep, heavy with cat.
She should have kept her legs to herself,
that ticking while I babysat self, my money in hand,
my baby belly asking, who got in first?
Who didn't lock the door?
Who faltered?
What knot did she put in her face?
Some kind of marrow, an arrow of a girl
asking again and gain, why?
Why do they always want to put it in there?
There, there, the man should have
said, when he brought her to nowhere, some special delivery.
He has given up on ever seeing her again
as he takes her arm he doesn't want to touch,
and she breathes in the panic of horses in a field of fire
at me, a small desire.
Is it there, I want to ask her, the low form, asking.
I want to ask her, did it hurt like broken Binaca bottles
going under the skin, like shattered glass in the butt,
but like that, like fire?
Sure, man, like that, like liar, like some tree.
Some man will make you pee your pants
if you don't lock the door, my grandmother warned me.
It was like peeing your pants.
I dreamt it smelled like flame, like holy water,
the bruise still misting my vision
but safe, some kind of arresting.
Make me, hermanita, make fire, they called in the bright.
And I went for it, barefoot, and mattered, my grandmother
terminated at the edge of her deliverance, at the mall,
at the end of 1842, of 1492 ways to gather your pennies
and dream of good weather, of every number that's
ever been fought for.
That's how to get ahead.
Fight for your numbers.
Lock the door, I would have told her.
She didn't.
She didn't listen to her grandmother's wisdom,
and now she has broken herself, this woman,
the one who doesn't cave at the heart getting
marked under the great tires of Acme America,
or the man who takes her along for it, all fury at the one who
would-- all fury at the one he would shoot
if he had a gun, a small me.
The dead grow tired of guns.
They whine for ice cream, some utterance, some fantastic joke
like there used to be.
They get no respect.
They are not on our cells unless we put them there
under your famous call.
I find some scribbled up, the X of the unalphabetized
left unmarked for use or the six-figure contracts
of their multiple burials.
They are ones shoved short of room
you are going to go home to.
The dirges you sing wake from the wakes from the boats
without cargo on the River Styx.
The sticks, the old toolies that skin
them flay away the only souls they'll ever know.
I have run down the lunatic streets holding my painted
satin skirts between my stiffening legs together,
I, wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters
I am holding together to the heart of me,
and when the river sees me, it knows
drowning men can't touch me.
And when will the heavens open, only nameless lives
can hear me.
They open their puny pockets to the fog-struck morning.
Only the foreign sun thins this eve-struck land,
this parched settlement where we wait,
this garden of the heart's delight and the memory therein.
The seeds crush under the heavy trucks, blown away
by their wingless destiny, a woman running,
all the fear of her, as she's blown away
by the tattered rattle of automatic gunfire unto
matriarchy.
Fill the slots of men's asses with coin
while copulating masses heave under the dry ocean-scratched
sand.
And the hurricanes breathe for us,
and the earth fumbles below, belly full of birth.
I am in the night over and over to get it out,
each one, each year.
The wasting of my age, it is good to quantify.
It calms down the doomy drunks with missing addition.
What is the good?
They long for a second language and argue in the no reply.
And the true stay gullible, waiting in their hearts
for the raving seabirds, but all they
get are the painted landscapes to land.
They are never getting, never tranced
into puzzles for their missing pieces.
They keep it glued together with eggs
and stuck to the walls of their prisons
as their best calendars.
As they are, it never works out.
They crumble into pieces.
Their best calendars fade.
The real estate agents retire into
their comfortable mortgages while the plastic spoons
of the poor's tomorrow beg for a fix, anything to fix it up
tomorrow, la mañana that never comes for the too-raw rub.
The woman will pay, the man lost to more photocopying of girls,
their slave screens holding the fingerprints of blue,
if they were more than this dust under the cracks and creaking
floorboards.
They require the room to die, so they
go outside, where freedom lives, their heads in their hands,
their diploma from the crumbling peeking out
from the bar like the small hand of the left-behind child
left in the smoking car while the weary sleep it off
one more time.
One thing!
Just one thing lacking, they murmur
to the jungle of one, the golfing judge,
the drinking healer begging their fall.
The churches ring on every corner of America, I plus,
or would ring if they had a bell and believed in the bull.
The bell in the hall between hemispheres
rings, but it's an arson fire and a melted telephone,
old school.
And it rings off the hook while the hooks and daggers
of the young who serve wait for them gleaming in the night
with their baskets of doom, their hollow-man heels clicking
in virtual echo behind them for one last time, one final thing,
one thing, one fling, one long golden bow, the bow,
or the silvered screen where they see who they really are,
some half utterance naked but fulfilling,
till death do us part, one spirit to all.
[APPLAUSE]
So, debut of that poem.