This is-- I think, weirdly I had this conversation with you
guys today that, I guess, I'm reading these.
It was like a fart, like a giant fart from outside, it was so.
I was like, what is that?
That's not human.
It's so weird.
Yeah, I'm going to read it.
I'm going to read it.
OK.
So yeah, if you go on YouTube and look
for Eileen Myles, The Trip, you will see a Super 8 Puppet road
film that you will not be wasting
17 minutes of your time.
But there's-- so they're actually puppets that I made
when I was like nine years old.
And I've lost so many things in my life.
But I have not lost these puppets.
And so in Marfa, I got the great idea because--
is Michael Fenster here?
I don't know.
We made a film together.
We decided to make a film that was taking
the puppets on a road trip from Marfa
to Alpine, which is 25 miles in this mountains on both sides.
It's a great trip.
And one of the puppets from the cast from childhood
was in the film Casper, a ghost, amazingly,
but it was like a German Casper.
Because the woman who taught us was German.
Her name was Miss Ursula.
And weirdly in the film when Casper started to talk--
and I was the voice.
Casper's voice became very peculiar.
And I was like, who is this voice?
And it was like Miss Ursula.
So I'm kind of channeling her a bit.
I don't know.
I'm not-- as a poet, I'm not an actor.
So I'm not-- I can't reliably bring up a voice.
It just might happen in a way.
It might take me over.
I heard that.
OK.
So this is Casper.
So this is just a monologue from the film.
"This is not the end of the story.
Oh no.
I may begin my life as a college student
approximately 88 miles from the US-Mexico border
here on the white steps of Sul Ross University
named after a Confederate general.
Here, if they accept me, I may study thought and meaning
and study itself.
I may study plankton and clouds, mountains, cell phones,
and ghosts.
But I am a ghost born in Eileen's child hands,
head of paper maché, a gown fashioned of soft cloth
that Emma found.
In a way a puppet, a ghost--" It's
almost like poet voice, but a puppet doing poet voice.
"In a way a puppet, a ghost truth be told,
is a zombie, the undead, never born,
never dying, never arriving.
I make common cause now with the slaves of the world.
Prisoners of our security state.
And most abundantly, most locally, today, America's
prisoners of war.
Not immigrants, illegals, aliens, but refugees, children,
women, and men in jails, in cages not
far from here, a multitude less visible than a ghost,
more silent than a puppet.
They are not criminals, these people
brayed about by politicians, kept
away from friendship, pleasure, health, and safety in the dark,
but refugees in a never ending war.
This country wages against the poor and vulnerable,
victims, descendants, recipients of our endless interventions
in Latin America.
Our wars worldwide and in our jails, detained at our borders,
helped by our friend Israel exporting their security craft
around the world.
Abolish all of it.
The borders, and the jails, and the police state,
open the door, RIP.
Not rest in peace, but abolish the racist imperialist
patriarchy.
Abolish it.
Abolish it now."
Again, I didn't know it was going to distort
into that at the end.
I was just like--
OK, this is--