Thank you, Gabriel.
[LAUGHTER]
That was amazing.
And it's always great when somebody taller than you
says they look up to you.
[LAUGHTER]
Although it never occurred to me to say that before.
Hello.
Thanks for being here, and tolerating whatever the hell
this is going to be.
And I just want to thank the Poetry Center and Paola
and Tyler and everybody.
It's been a wonderful few days.
I went out to that Agua Caliente Park that y'all got here.
That's pretty cool.
They don't have anything like that in New York.
I saw the biggest snowy egret I've ever seen, I think, there.
So I imagine the birds are being fed well
in this part of Arizona.
And, let's see.
Oh, my phone buzzes, and I have it on the podium,
you will hear it.
So that's a good mic.
All right, I'm going to need that, but not right this second.
And is this loud enough?
Yes.
I'm going to read some poems from this book that
got published about a year ago called Don't Forget To Love Me.
I'm just going to say first, though,
that I was 9 in that video.
[LAUGHTER]
It's blurry, so it could--
and I haven't-- my hair cut is the same for 15 years, so--
and the reason I got in it was because I
liked getting autographs back then, mostly
from baseball players.
And so they were filming this Rolling Stones
video on the block, and I told my dad, who was still
alive at the time, Ted Berrigan, I said,
I want to get Mick Jagger's autograph.
I'm not sure I even knew who he was exactly at that point.
And my dad said, well, if you're going to do that,
and you should, let me give you a copy of one of my books,
and go and see if you can trade it to him for an autograph.
[LAUGHTER]
So if the shot had been just a little lower,
it would have showed me holding a copy of his book
So Going Around Cities in my hand,
because once I got out there and looked around, I was like,
I'm not getting anywhere near this guy.
Even though it was 1981 and it wasn't cordoned off,
there were tons of people there, so--
Peter Tosh is in that video, I think.
OK.