I don't think I'm going to do this one.
I'm going to pull one up for my phone, actually.
The next poem that I'm going to read is called White Star Woman.
And this is after the painting American Progress by John Gast.
I think in this past year it was reposted by the DHS,
and that really annoyed me.
So I was like, I'm going to write about it.
And this is that poem.
If you don't know what that poem is,
it's basically manifest destiny in a painting.
And this person in the center is this woman
who's very beautiful, kind of like a biblical figure,
and she looks gorgeous.
And the things that are happening beneath her
are very much not that.
And so I wanted to think a little bit more about that.
White Star Woman.
I'm swanning above muskets.
I'm an east door entrance.
Witness.
My invasion is the light.
The state encroaches on what is understated.
It's those dark muscles moving, flexed, and strained red.
The figures are fleeing westward.
Locomotive like my imagination billows
then buckles its fangs like the prairie plow.
I do my daily syllabic scalping.
And hang their story skulls on telegraph wires.
Then breeze them dry with my duster dreams
because I dream only of day.
And I think it will be a good day.
The day I will suckle on buffalo milk
and get to slaughter the herd.
Because it is not the cow spilling out
white, and white, and white.
Here come my good American men.
Raising their arms in prayer for me,
because the barrel is my second metal mouth.
Does my talking and soft lead syntax
on days when my shrapnel semantics look
to shoot the new world through someone's sockets.
I want to stun them with a sacred vision.
A holy derangement.
A solar hole through the head.
My heaven will live righteous without the maggots
in the margins.
[APPLAUSE]