It's good to establish if we're going to clap or not
clap after poems early.
And so we're not clapping.
That's cool.
But then don't clap for any poems, OK,
because I'm going to feel like, OK,
that poem is good and all the rest of them weren't.
So we're just-- we're chilling.
Are there any WW--
it was WWF when I was a kid-- but WWE
or professional wrestling fans in the house?
Yeah, really?
OK, my guy.
Yeah, when I grew up, that was what we cared about.
We watched SmackDown.
We watched Raw, and so on.
There were pay-per-view stuff that you couldn't
access unless you could convince your parents to pay money
so you could watch it.
Anyway, we all had our favorite wrestlers,
and we didn't really understand that it was fake.
And so we would practice the moves on each other.
This poem, it's the title poem of the first book,
and I wrote it really just trying
to get some of the language of professional wrestling
into a poem.
The names of the moves are amazing.
You'll see.
And then it ends up spiraling in the way that good poems do.
They get away from you, and they end up
being about a lot more than you intended in the first place.
I think you'll see what I mean.
It's called "Tap Out."
"We were vicious.
Swollen cheekbones, bruised jaws.
Forearms chafed raw and weeping.
The Boston
Crab.
The Texas Cloverleaf.
The Cross-
Face Chicken Wing.
One time"-- that's a real move, Bob Backlund shout-out.
"One time, Ant wrenched
my shoulder so hard I couldn't lift my arm
for a week.
Another time, Mike's brother Daryl tried
a front-flip slam off the back steps, landed
face first in the dirt.
Wrist bone shot clear
through the skin and gleaming.
Mike's dad worked
second shift at Pratt, so if we were loud he'd holler
out the bedroom window, but there was nothing
he could do to punish us we weren't already doing
to each other.
And we knew it.
Like that time
Daryl showed us his pistol, a .22 he lifted
from a friend's house.
We passed it around,
weighing it in our palms.
It was heavier
than it looked, but it felt good.
He put the barrel
in his mouth and when we jumped up
he laughed and laughed.
'Priceless!' he said red-faced
and gasping. 'You pussies almost wet your pants!'
We learned new moves, new ways to shock the body
into miracles of pain.
The Figure-Four Lock.
The Vise Grip.
Every muscle trembling.
The Tarantula.
The Camel Clutch.
Mouth
pressed against their ear, hissing 'Tap out, dickhead,
you're not getting out of this, you're mine, kid,
tap out and it'll stop.'
The Sharpshooter.
The Hammerlock.
That sour-hot breath in your ear
and knowing you won't give in, you won't give him
the satisfaction, even when it hurts more
than anything, more than your dad's belt
blistering your backside, more than the night
when Daryl put that gun in his mouth and the sound
of it woke the whole block, so much you grit
your teeth against the pain, sharp kneecap
bearing down on your chest, elbow torqued
past its limit, and you swear you could bust out
of yourself and look down at your body, helpless
and small and trembling, press your mouth
to your own ear and whisper 'Not you.
Not you.'"