WEBVTT
I'm just going to do a couple more.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
It was important in this book that I
was going to-- if I was going to get down
some story about the land and where
I come from that I was attentive to the entire system of it
rather than just the postcard iconography of it.
And my middle school was a treacherous place,
and I'm sure it still is.
But in this poem, I smuggled this infamous graffito
from those hallways.
And it's a poem better than anything I could write.
So I'll try to, like, pronounce it and make it come out.
This is called Night Camouflage.
I look like what I am: storefront rememberer.
A mildewed stack of dead arcana with no currency
to lie and claim you read.
The station every aged out abductee
claims to have risen to then cut and run from.
Feeling for old drums of future war in structures,
powerless, riddled by the Zippo lighted scrawls:
hit a crip in the lip.
What drip, what crawls, throw towels on it,
skewer it with push knives while Edith Street sleeps.
Mix concrete adrenalized by the sheer sustained torment
of your cleaved off undeveloped twin's unsmotherable dust,
pneumonia wincing.
Lock your door.
List your house.
I'm just putting shit at this point in the calendar.
The city gazes back now.
[APPLAUSE]