All right.
So this is the last one.
It's a little long.
It's a little longer than the other ones.
It's called "Postscript."
And it circles back to that first slide
in which I posited that this book was kind of a spreadsheet.
And it's also a little bit of an ars poetica
or maybe manifesto, lowercase m.
"Postscript."
"If this book is a spreadsheet, it
is also a spell, an incantation, a windshield flashing
with sun and rain, a document of grass crowding sidewalks,
dropping flower and seed out of season like me.
Russian thistle spun to tumbleweed without our tending.
It's also a book about poems as pockets of resistance,
a taxi stalled at a rush hour intersection,
about our attempts to slip out from under the heel
of capitalism, about a refusal to be complicit with atrocities
committed in the name of citizenship.
A burning tent, a library stormed by flame.
If this book is a check registry,
it's also a love letter, an indictment, the memory
of the woman screaming, murderer, murderer,
murderer on the G train, another anthem, deny, defend, depose.
I want whiteness to become as thin as a paycheck.
I want capitalism to fray like the social safety net.
If this book is a series of monthly statements,
it's also a ledger of questions.
Can we collaborate instead of nation?
How do we root without becoming a gun
in a glove box, an armored vehicle in the desert?
How do we photosynthesize?
Be a circle of soft green arrows on a classroom poster.
You be the watershed.
I'll be the nimbus cloud.
How do we untangle the lyric from capitalism, from whiteness,
from award season?
How much would you give up because trying
to hold on costs too much?
If this book is about money, it's
also about the rupture, the rupture of rain and drought,
about our attempts to remain in the wake of the category 5,
the wildfire, the polar vortex.
You should not need to be perfect to be safe.
The money makes the weather.
The wire transfers write history.
The people who authorize our payments
sift through the sky like an archive.
The satellites ChatGPT us.
The night learns to read our writing about the night.
I humbly submit to my board of directors,
whomever you think you are, that my plan for growth
is rebellion and rest, riot, strike, riot, improvise,
and nest.
This book does not want to be a long of my--
log of my productivity.
Was the investment worth the payout?
Couldn't she have done more?
My genre is national hunger, economic trauma, debt.
This book is not inscribed onto bullets that kill CEOs, does not
kill fascists but wants to sing along with those who will
sing the oligarchs to death.
We refuse to be frayed as that social safety net.
Let's poetry the tech prose, lines breaking into shivs,
the metaphors making tire irons.
May we assemble like a sonnet, get projective in the streets,
revise a history of soot into our seedling."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]