We are in an interesting political season.
I'm going to say something and I don't--
this may have been our last election.
I live in Texas.
I'm often engaging our Texas state legislature,
and I can tell you from the great state of Texas,
fascism is already there.
And so this poem came out of an experience
of testifying in front of the state legislature
and watching legislators turn their back on me, because I
disagreed with a bill that would have limited what
we could say happened in America in terms of American history.
I watched Republicans get up and leave.
So this poem doesn't do the memoiristic approach to it,
but you'll see.
It's called In The House of Senators.
Better the decency of living with lions rather than saints
who stand at a bank of elevators in the heavenly shaped parking
garage, ignoring you who were once a colleague,
in touching the ear back mouth of a soul
and shattering it into ink, ecstasy, profit.
Now you who were a golden hand are an antelope languishing
in the low church of the city.
A common animal too feral for firm jobs
in the firmament of righteous labor.
So the saint looks down at his calfskin covered feet, twists
the knot of silk at his neck, coughs into his blue hands,
mumbling of unclean animals at every turn of his off eye.
Better to live with lions who take you into the grass
after having prayed for your delivery and blood
not for its change, but for its sustenance
and pulse as is funky in the vernacular of its horn, split
hooves and heavy running.
Better what can be outran and bows to its loss.
The lion in its loss bows to that which outruns it.
Unlike the saint in prayer, who sends his heart wrapped
in sashed and purloined silk, robed
in arrows onto the back of a black stallion made of ash,
sends it anywhere his eye fields the unclean thing,
the unclean spirit, and calls for a miracle,
which is the death of living.
Living without the need for miracles,
which is a living I would rather:
life at the mouth of lions.
[APPLAUSE]