 Hello and welcome everyone. Thanks for coming to this evening's poem jam. I'm John Smalley, and I'm at a librarian with the San Francisco Public Library. While we're waiting for a couple other folks, I want to take a moment to acknowledge our community and to tell you about a couple of our upcoming programs. On behalf of the Public Library, we wish to welcome you to the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramatush Aloni, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. As the indigenous stewards and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramatush Aloni have never lost seated nor forgotten their responsibilities as caretakers of this place. As guests, we who reside in their traditional territory recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. We wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramatush community and by affirming their sovereign rights as First Peoples. Tonight's program is being filmed for our archives. It will be uploaded to the library's YouTube channel. If you do not wish to be photographed, let me know, or one of our staff members know. For those of you who are here for the first time, I want to mention that the poem jam poet reading series takes place every month on the second Thursday of the month in this very room. And it is curated by the poet Kim Shuck. Next month's poem jam will be a second collaboration with Manifest differently, but will feature different authors. Next Thursday, January 18, in the same room, Kim Shuck will host a very special program celebrating the life and work of the Bay Area poet, Mary Norbert Kurtte. Please, I hope you'll come back for this unique program. You can learn more about our upcoming poetry programs and other SFPL programs by picking up a flyer or newsletter from the table over there, where you will also find coffee and cookies, and the last of the limited edition 2023 poem jam pin. So help yourself to those also. That ends my announcements. Please give a warm welcome to Kim Shuck, who will introduce the rest of the program. Thank you, John. Before I get into tonight's show, I do want to mention again the 18th here. Mary Norbert Kurtte was a beat poet who you never really hear about. She lived a life of service and was not self-aggrandizing, and therefore people don't remember who she was. And those of us who do, including myself and Lyndon Oll, decided we wanted to dedicate an evening to reading her work so that people would remember why it's really important to know who she was, because the work is really solid and wonderful stuff. So I hope you decide to come back and visit us for that. Manifest differently is a project that's been, we've been working on it for a couple of years now. Megan Wilson for three years, yeah. I was writing some copy about it, and I was like, is it really been three years? And it was going through my calendar. It has really been three years. And we are right on the cusp of the opening of the biggest part of the show. And also now we're showcasing our poets who've been working on this project for not quite as long as Megan and I have, but for a long time. Megan and I had sort of different versions, visions of what this was, which is what always happens when you collaborate on things. But mine sort of comes out of, I had thought that people knew that native women were being kidnapped and murdered at a high rate. I thought people knew that. And we're just not doing anything about it. And it was causing a lot of anger in me. And I had written a piece after my daughter died for 55 days, I wrote a poem every day on the subject of murder and missing indigenous women. And I found out when I was reading that book around that people didn't know that that was happening. And I thought, well, if people don't know that that's happening in my community, what don't we know about what's happening in other communities? What don't I know? So that was part of my vision for it. How do we talk to one another about the various colonizations, either cultural or locational, or the way people's histories have been erased, the way people themselves have been erased? And so we asked 19 poets and 19 visual artists to work on this subject and make art and write things either about their hopes or about, you know, show me on the poem where it hurts, you know, so that we could start learning cross communities to not injure each other in the process of collaboration. And obviously this is not, I mean, three years sounds like a long time. This is not a drop, right? There are people who are reading tonight whose cultural struggles have basically completely fallen off of the general radar of news. There are people whose ongoing struggles are things that we are really clear about. There are people who have multicultural backgrounds and some of which vanish because of the way race is perceived in this country. These issues are complicated. We're not going to solve them in one art show, not even one really big art show, not even one really big art show with a lot of great and articulate poets, but we're doing our best. So we're presenting three people tonight. We were intending to present four, but for drastic medical reasons, the first person had to drop out and then also the second person for other drastic medical purposes. So I thought I'm not going to try to fill that slot again. Apparently this is incredibly unlucky and I'm just going to leave it empty. So it's a really powerful reading anyway. Now, I met Lourdes Figueroa in, I can't remember the name of that space, but it was over at a reading in Oakland, no, Alameda, on Alameda Island. And Doug and I gave her and her wife a ride home afterwards and it was an adventure. And I've loved her work since the first time I heard it and it's only getting better. So please welcome to the microphone Lourdes Figueroa. Thank you, Kim. Thank you for creating this space and I'm very grateful to be here this evening. I'm just going to dive in and I'll put in little specs of dialogue here and there with the poems, but I'm very grateful to be here and we're all here this evening. So here we go. What I'm going to about to read from is a poem. It's a long poem that's been in the works since actually since it was a request from Kim to work with Manifest differently, which is an awesome title. So this poem grew from and was inspired by Ana Castillo's Massacre of the Dreamers, where within it she says, I was unable to unearth the female Indigenous consciousness. That I am certain is part of my genetic collective memory and life experience. This poem that I'm reading from is called I Will Kiss Your Mouth Between Overbrown, Milba. It's an encounter of the deepest form of love and commitment to the expansion of the heart. It's lean towards Manifest differently and now a bloom towards her missing codices in a moxley that we now don't have, but very much are in our limbs, limbs of all of our pocha cuerpos. My entire arrows for the Machica consciousness is here. Prayer beads are slipping off an open poem. From all the spaces between lives, from all openings and closings, from windows to the doors, we did not close the night. 8,000 bodies, the poem sought. From the abrazos I refused, to the bedrooms of the woman that received me, to the body that is my pocha body now. To the hearth between her legs, our souls move. Make words open, close their lips. From the overwhelming dream that I awoke from this dawn, you made me scared to be alive. From the distance between my memories and your childhood, from the cracks in the bathroom wall, in our house, to the wet blood on the locker room floor, from us walking home from la tiendita with a bag of jetos, from your shy sight glances, and your blushing cheeks, an entire empire that looks to be alive in this world, you, you, the great sparling expanse reaching out to me. I love you. From this summer, wide-open dulcet les soyes, a hatred, a blind love, a science, a science, a revolution, a revolution, a civil war. The aftermath of the penetration, it is happening again. Our tongue is tangling. May this be a relapse of love, war, our biggest mess. We won't stop. How many bodies will it take to make the poem as large as the sound of water? Ask the Mayan god of earth and tree. Ask the god of all goddesses, which is you. Will we begin again? Like every dawn at 3 AM, the seventh cape opens and closes. Where are our kids? How many songs are we singing to each other? The mouth of El Rio is beginning a revoltijo. With all the drowned, all what hurts of me, of you, of me, our bodies aren't easy. The Euphrates is whistling once again. What can we conquer? What could we conquer? How much harm have we done? I swear to you, the kids died without eating. These angers, this now, this how, this is how we tell each other, I love you. This is how we tell I love you after El Rio Grande, all of it, all of it, no holes unfilled. We did it to each other. I remember now. It was the both of us crying into the night, stuffing the boat with the fallen apples from a season that happened the day before. So we could say to each other, there was never any knowledge in the language, only in the ability of our heart to say beat. I covered our skins with a delicate, assuming breath like the kind of, that kind of breath that fogs around like bees tend to do around a very dulce bloom. The beginning of summer was a humid, unassuming harvest. The kids were playing inside the cornfields. They had sweat on their noses. The sun was bright and white. There are things in my life that I thought I understood. To begin again is to see you again. Nowalt in my organs, nowalt in my torso, nowalt in our gestures, regardless of the temples near the liquor store or the overgrown milpa. Our small brown hands open on our eyes. The children giggling once. And once our pocha tongue was slang and now we use it for every verse, an arrow slicing through the language of a sonnet. We have been singing for so long that the verb has melted over. The moxley and the colysis, a herd of galloping severed limbs. Their nerves alive, crossing desert, mountain, sea, river. From this distance, a sweaty mirage, a prayer bead slipping further away, the closer we get. The sound of water sounding different inside the ears of the thirsty. The moment you walked out of my chest, your left muslo was to the north, to the other one spread to the south. Your torso and lips pointing east and west. Se vemos lo que éramos en la madrugada. El día traspasó más de 2,300 años. Ya no somos las mismas. And I dipped the fat of my palm inside the afterglow of the morning star. She caught the light we all have been worshipping, color lapiz lazuli. Hoy me escondí bajo el humo y me fijé en los fragmentos. Nuestros preciosos fragmentos. Hechos de células que hacen sangre y músculo. Me escondí buscando te. Me topé con el tiempo, el tiempo que se olvida y el polvo de nosotras. Polvo que es arena. Arena que ha sido volteada. Torturara en ser y luego echada. Y me pregunté, le pregunté a mi corazón. ¿Quién es el polvo? ¿Cómo fuimos? ¿Y cómo somos? ¿A dónde vamos? Todas mis esperanzas en mi boca, en mi garganta, en tus cuerpos, todas las palabras, un puño de polvo. And I read one final part of the poem. The last time, the very last morning that I thought we would be together forever. I watched you from the bed, watching your reflection of you gazing at you. The bathroom door ajar. Your body naked, brown, pearl-like skin. The silhouette of your breast as you raised your arm, palm to your face. Everything felt like burnt honey with a soft smell of your axilla. A soft stream of the morning Kansas light poured on our lavender flowered sheets. You were the first and last to slip, the spoons full of rhubarb pie into my mouth. Light sweet heart. Your gaze kept wavering from empty to hardness. As you stood in front of the mirror, my from hardness to silence, you became every day after that day in the same way pearls from inside the womb of a womb form. And I understood it was a pain you wanted to carry on your own. Not one unit to bleed into our lives as it bled into our lives, puddles of blood and everything we did or not. Because there were so many days after that, it would just be you and you just rocking back and forth on your rocking chair forever forgetting to look at me. A deep silence that felt like a dull ache. An undiscovered massacre under our feet, haunting until the archeologists or some developers accidentally rubbed it to sight. Pulling a fragment of bone that belonged to somebody that maybe was like you, astute, facetious. Really a total smart ass to the point of collapsing wars. I didn't know where to begin to hold you except to stand by. My arms wide open, stoically ready, just ready to catch you in any way I could. And I started to miss you so hard right there in our very home. Not knowing how to translate your body movements for a request of love. You must have been reaching from the deepest void, that cenote that we're all from and we all fail to recognize over and over again. How do I make this language sparse enough? So it is only and only our bodies are making kissing sounds. For the sake of this verse, there's a loop on repeat. Repeating itself, a loop watching itself. It is not a broken record. Beginning at the same place we doom and save ourselves. None of us saw it coming. Each century, the legs of a woman wide open, buddhor entre muslo, sudor entre verbo, verbo en cueros, lengua mojada, resbalándose, entre tenso pasado, futuro en lo podrido del hoy. Porque en lo podrido renace un cuerpecito hacia otro. Y una manzana roja se come y nos perdemos entre medafora y tambor, el viento soplando, el gusano comiéndose, para hacerse mariposa. Solo te ruego que pongas tu cuerpo encima del mío. My arrows is a desire to be fully machica again. To unearth them out the amoksli that became dust and hell. All of our first songs disappeared only to live in the unlanguage of our sweat. As I slipped my hands into her chest to feel the wet of her blood, she looked straight into my eyes. All the seven caves swallowed in and within her closed mouth she sang, we destroyed my life. And it was just one kiss. Now go ahead, take a bite out of my torso. You are the prodigal language. Welcome home, mijas. I've waited an eternity for you. I've been trying to stitch the emptiness, what's indented in all of us, even with the ones that took Donatía's side together for each other. For Nana Watson, who no longer has a name, nor a sex, has become everything and nothing. So we could be here. We, the children of the noble. I think of her and how we remember each other when we first learned to make love. Lake in la cima del trigo in the place of the seven caves, rompiendo the callus of the hoe. Her navel sunk as the eye licked the rim of the ear in demacol. Tosí le herdas, but as the poem made of song and breath. Aquí mil besos for the lost fragments of our codices and moxley. And as with la equis and our bodies, spices and tire who become Nana Watson's fragments. There are besos de amor. In the long ago gaze, the voice said today, only three or four Maya codices remain. Three of them are named for the European cities where they are kept, dressed in Paris and Madrid. Here in Mifin. Gracias. I live, be careful what you ask for all the time, because I frequently ask poets for specific things. And then I get them. So, thank you so much, Lourdes. Another round of applause please. I'm at the next poet in a bookstore on 24th Street in Noe Valley. And there are people with whom you become friends immediately, just immediately, right away. It's the friend version of love at first sight. And that has been my experience with Moshinwin. And, you know, Loria de Merida, all manner of other things. She's one of my favorite people. Let's welcome Ma to the microphone. Hello everyone, wonderful to be here. I want to thank Kim and Megan and the whole team for Manifest differently. It's been a lot of work I know. All right, I'd like to begin with an excerpt from a piece by Burmese poet, Cocoa Thet. What's going on in Myanmar? Nothing unusual for someone from Burma, at least. For the whole world as well, so it seems. A military coup happened. The ensuing resistance is met with bloody repression. And now there's conflict all over again. What's going on in Myanmar? The child waiter who worked in Zai Gang is now a child soldier in the resistance. Just like in the old days, street children in urban areas collect used water bottles and empty beer cans, sirs, madams, empty bottles or beer cans please. People who live in apartments will appear at their windows and throw the empty bottles at children in the street as if they were feeding fish in a pond. In the meantime, the junta remains brutal as usual. What's going on in Myanmar? Fuel price hiked, there are long queues at gas stations and at the roadside black market fuel dealers just like in the old days. There's tyranny of power outage just like in the old days. In the sweltering summer, the sales of hand vans soared. In the meantime, the junta remains brutal as usual. What's going on in Myanmar? History is repeating as farce just like in the old days. People queue up to refuel their disposable plastic gas lighters. Lighter flints are banned. The junta suspects that flints are used in homemade weapons. You may top up your lighter. You may not make fire without a flint. Hyphen log, question mark, comma hyphen. Hyphen, marks punctuated by division upon division. A leaving behind, a coming toward, a moving between. Language heard over tables, under walls. How we connect, how we do not. Flip flops, tea shop, full stop. Burma, Myanmar. Born within a border is another border. Collision tables, brain sprain, division trains. A comma, soft pause, separates conjunctions. Shot echoes, cyclone pound, Blue Maria rain. And the title of this poem is catalog. Catalog, check work email, read about flooding in Puerto Rico, put lotion on dry legs, spectrovite vitamin bottles on dining room table, sip warm coffee, try to remember next PT appointment, listen to bird songs on YouTube, makes me think of the bird on yesterday's walk, my friend trying to ID with an app on her phone. The announcement by Taco Bell that their guacamole would not suffer from the impact of Mexico's dearth of avocados. Leg stretches, where should I donate my clothes? Picture my mother alone in bed at the monastery. The abbess in Rukuti sending out newsletters on compassion. Soldiers gun down village in Myanmar. Text a client to close up photos of the scars on my abdomen, which I meant to send to my doctor at Kaiser. A thin trail of blood in one, the other shaped like a star, my navel exposed, my hand holding up my right breast. Observation log, we hear chants. Do their protests sound out of future? We'll be able to witness. My family in Yangon no longer leaves home and this is called storage unit for the spirit house. The father at dining room table, shades drawn, wobbly thrown. The daughters with their brown shaky hands. A forest nat haunts the master closet among the clothes moths, felt Wolverines. Daughter number one hiding behind a juniper bush, bright loongies, wooden handgun in metal case. Daughter number two sleeps with a long broom next to her bed. Mint chocolates under pillow. 5 a.m. the father drops a cold wet towel on her face. Storage unit filled with boxes of LPs, Joanie, Dylan, Carly. Back cover of Jimi Hendrix experience. On two hits of acid, this will blow your brains out. Dusty military jackets, punishment belt, piles of lock boxes, missing keys. Jars of Nescafe, VHS tapes of Burmese pop singers. Daughter number three listens to father's records in the den, altered music room. Sits on the piano bench near the door. The father in armchair, Joanie singing a case of you. Forest snot flutters above in air smoky from Kent 100s. Log thought. Four heads thumping. Hourglass flip. Can you see, see me? Can you hear, hear me? Miracle vaccine made in Burma. Vayne machine, spirit house five. As a child, I did not climb trees. Instead, I gathered leaves that flew to the ground. The Elms were tall in the fall. The neighbor boys cruel. One left a dead kitten in a box on the doorstep. I made homes among the leaves. Safety in gold, yellow, brown. Invented a family who lived in a treehouse. Green twig, the mother. Cracked branch, the father. Two ferns, the missing sisters. And this is kind of a newish poem. The air over there for our aunties and uncles in Burma. The air they can't breathe. The breath they can't take. The air we can't share. Air is smoke. Smoke is air over here. There. From soldiers guns, young ones shoot their own. Villagers forced to flee. They hide in trees. Leave homes behind. Can't see the air over there. Ahead last breaths in the riverbed. Blackouts abound. Omens trigger rituals by regime. Huntaboss tighten screws. Not in the news. Aunties, uncles try to breathe indoors. Keep windows shut. We're at alert. Trees on fire. Will we ever share air over here? There. And this is my second to last poem. I lived in India and this poem is about an experience there. Ocean lament. Seabirds found on the shore. Plastic knots around necks. I survived the boxing day tsunami in 2004. Guilt haunts. Crowns, bones, skulls, soaked satin cloaks. Danu goddess of primordial waters sings. When the ocean was clear, clear blue. From the third floor of the temple we see the waters rising below. Dark and fast and cold. Snakes swimming around our legs. Can't find my black sandals. Before humans arrived, the coral and dolphins, seaweed and sharks were free of disease. A week after we returned to the ashram, I searched for a family in their hut where I'd buy half a coconut every morning. We will emerge in another place. On the ocean floor are old cars and shipping containers. Can only find in the mud a child's red plastic sandal. Danu in lament. And this is my last poem. Observation log. Warmed a nest in my balmy palm. Placed it back in its ginkgo tree. Turned aside and took rest for a while. Thank you for listening. This is the vision of all of those workshops that we've probably attended. For me, I feel like just listening to people read or that workshop. To read to Michael. Now, I'm spacing how long we've known each other, or I'm saying that because I don't want to admit how long it's been, one or the other. We met originally through California poets in the schools and sort of sideways through Carolee Sanchez and DeVore Major and the usual suspects. And it's been quite a rude. And Terita is alchemy. And that's what I'm going to say about you. Okay, welcome, Terita, up to this microphone. Wow. It's always amazing to listen to poets you admire or you just, you know, it puts you in a zone. And thanks for inviting me, Kim, and me to be a part of this program. Because, you know, we could just, the Bay Area alone, poets upon poets upon poets that you listen to and take in and ma. Okay, go back. So, yeah, the order changed a little bit, but I'm going to hang in there. Okay, I did write something for this event. And sorry about this. It keeps wanting to fly away. So I'm going to read some things from my book that's coming out as well as Haikus. I've been telling Meg about Haikus and it's been a journey. So they may begin just when I'm waking up. So bear with me. They sound a little, you know, did you hear story? White man's burden entails half devil, half child. Black lives do matter, mattered to the KKK, ways to terminate. What a blip, my child. Graveyard's are not the goal here. Listen carefully. Hypnotized by lies, hegemony breaks tongues psych. Church spells organize. God's son sacrificed. Blood money runs, wheels be done. Wars follow leader. Which witch sits with them? Vickers Christ sacks a stem. All trees not equal. Worship of warships. Knowledge defines decline. Designs culling rights. Disease destruction. Degradation exploitations. Mind land displacement. Clinch fist pound iced air. Eyes prize determine nation. Seers will be sown. This little light of mine. Working as a nurse phlebotomist at a plasma gold mine. Where corporate dealers dine on blood money growing rotund. They make aspirin. A peeing killer for bites that bleed from Mr. Jim's teeth. Who visits occasionally to see how his human merchandise is doing. Black, brown, Indian, Asian, poor, whites, unemployed, employed, make enough money to pay a bill by gas, get by. I'm educated for a game to sustain a living. At the cost of another's well-being. Make me want to holler hoeing for dollars. Walking floors five days a week, 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Procedure tray in hand, donor to donor. Cross check names, numbers, blood collection bags. Hand to another hand at centrifuge lab. Extracts plasma, erect IVs, restore red blood cells, prep another arm, tie another tourniquet, another vein for the vampire's reign. Hollywood be thy name. Thy still fangs come. Blood money runs deep like the rivers. My savior's blood markets flow. Pay increases in God. We trust disease born broken. I grow until little light shines so bright. It sentenced me for violation of human rights. Enacts its plan. Stops my hand. Biocognitive judge stands. My wealth blocked. My paycheck hocked. It's high noon. What am I supposed to do? Donor watching asked, what's wrong? Because he needs his blood money too. Leave, said little light. Leave. I can't do that. And proceed with procedure. When little light overrules my demand and stops my hand again. Overthrown by this will to stand still, I place needle back on tray, untie the tourniquet, find another nurse to cover for me. I'm 30 years old, a single parent on my own. Living in a twilight zone like one child to support. I am supposed to leave a job that houses and feeds me and my babies, or did this little light of mine protest the sale of plasma bags for $989 giving donors 1% of that or 10? Was this little light of mine tired of degrading the body's design? Switching gold nutrient fluids for saline salt solution? Or did this little light of mine need me to redefine how I am to shine? How do I tell the lab manager something here is extremely wrong? Choose the words carefully. Tell him, I can't withdraw blood, but I'll prep arms and take a cut in pay. The answers, we hired you for your license if you can't do the job you can't stay. Terror enters my mind, but not my soul. When an inner voice said, I brought you this far, do you think I'd let you starve? Light testifies truth, loss of family, foster care, rape, obesity, Bell's palsy light kept shining through. I left the lab, never looked back, three months later hired as a lab tech in a psychiatric institution. Forced to lead that job as well, but that's another story how this little light of mine defends its right to shine in Oakland, where acorns grow mighty oaks, blood products increase radiantly to a $28 billion industry. This next piece is actually titled, Manifest Destiny Virtual Reality Recipe, and this is from my stint I had with the Exploratorium, and it's not all about the Exploratorium, but you'll get the gist of it. It's a recipe, virtual realities recipe, Manifest Destiny. Gather one group of astrophysicists and physicists, separate three parts, physicists to two parts, astrophysicists, split right brain and left brain hemispheres, pair never let the right hand know what the left is doing, ooze into a time capsule, allow decades to prepare, to stir in 100% academic self entitlement, 100% non-systemic English conditioners with 100% Queen Liz defender of a faith. Wrap in one God, one fate, one baptism. Detach sky chief from women, children, family. Break female from Holy Trinity. Debone natural conception's ability. Collect Adam Eve, Mary, Joseph's stories. Steep them in artificial insemination. Salt flesh heavily in sin. Mark mist, born broken, cure virgins, women and nuns in husband Jesus. Strip sexuality, bathe in virtual reality. Look but don't feel, smell but don't taste. Whip in self-flagellation, sensory deprivation. Add, you can't have your cake and eat it too. Prepare one real each of Frankenstein's separate-wise stew. View until contradictions thicken. Combine hegemony's lexicon. Hex will run non-causal microaggressions. Three, shred hormone receptors. Add menticide extract. Measure verbs act with nouns. Drop in spells. War is peace. Slavery is freedom. Ignorance is strength. Mix well. Coat in public relations. House of persuasion. Repeat seven times for adults, 14 times for children. Bind throat and feet in algorithms. Soak before broiling. Watch what is said and done before boiling. Select deceit type in racial disguise. Salt and pepper, black lies and white lies. Allow neck to stiffen in attrition. Simmer until bipolarism ascends. Then skim magnetic poles. Dislocate souls, crystallize dissonance, float in canine dog obedience. Fetch, heal, stay, obey. Poach the field therein or play. Manifest destiny. Four, virtual reality will change accordingly. Four, pan-fried tenderized vagus nerve. Infuse holograms. Reduce somatic cortex signals. Make sure there's no there, there. If intellect and mindfulness declines due to coming apart of the mental eye, good, use it. Squeeze manufactured consent into physiological tense. Place over high flame. Drip in fear. Monger gains. Expel cell immunity. Insert synthetic software of life. AI, lipid nanorobotics, mRNA, spike proteins, sodium nitrites, nitrates, formaldehyde, freeze, thaw, drizzle over synapse, increase lethargic naps, fold in copious amounts of glutton-rich, chemically complex carbs like Krispy Kreme donuts. Mush in brain fog, memory bone loss, roll in anger, fear, violence, depression, chill in marathons of television, merge mega-media goggles, implant serious attention, harvesting monitor, turn on, entertainment heat, bake for 60 years, remove, test if things are complete. At least nine of them. Five. Did insomnia, vomiting, headache, or death occur? Did disorientation, dizziness, shortness of breath, thoughts of suicide, or talimer's sever? If so, it's ready. Set the sick aside for MDs, psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and big pharma to grill or fry. Yes, form big, greasy balls of brand-name trends, blend biochemical upgrades with side effects, and 100-page, three-font Greek-Latin incoherence. Kreme parasympathetic nervous system. Note apps with device buying addictions. Spread robotic voice rhythms. Place GPT on hyper-media racks. Serve generously on platters that matter. Gauge how many psyches crack or who gets tracked simulating alternative facts. Six. You'll have consumers' oblivious, autistic, lustfully none. Renunciate survival instinct, become manifest for a destiny monetized for blindness. This sugar-high iced tea was brought to you by the Law of Exclusion, Masters of Biz Science, where sterilizing the public's mind without their knowledge is their most important product. And then I'm going to end, because I've learned that sometimes when there's a lot to... And I should end right now, right? Okay. Something a little lighter. Really, seriously. Holy ghost. Where heaven's bank on earth shorelines mothers. Where tides rise and break by sun, moon and stars. And children come forth as birthed ships, profits of immortalities. I said children come forth as birthed ships, profits of immortalities. Cells trillions singing throughout millenniums, holding tones, laws, genes, beings, waiting to astroblast into star-like, star-like generations. Generations germinating genies and genies of life, light, blood. Living waters. Captured and held by wells of human cells and held prisoner of infinite talents, faiths, wisdoms and profits. Ooh, holy ghost, mystery spooks us all like a ghost, but our organs cling to that origin. Plays keys, fulfills wishes, breathes on banks, and profits the profits of the holy ghost. And profits the profits of the holy ghost. And profits the profits of the holy ghost. Thank you. The lineup doesn't get a whole lot better than that. Can I have some more applause for Lourdes Figueroa, Lausanne Nguyen, and Tarita Miquel? Can manifest differently organizers stand up for a second? Megan, Kathy, come on. Mary Jean, can you stand up? I don't think I'm missing anybody. This has been a marathon, not a sprint. And we're not done with it yet. We've had crunch time in some ways, but thank you for sharing the experience with us. You've been seeing photographs of some of the new murals on Clarion Alley while people have been reading. I recommend you go look at them when it's not bucketing rain, which it's kind of been doing. And definitely after the 3rd of February, come see what we've been up to at Minnesota Street Project. Right now, there's also a show happening at ATA in the window. There's work by Afatasi the artist and inside the gallery. There's work by Artivate, which is a group of youth and a couple of people who help guide them. It's a portable printing studio, and they teach kids how to do prints. So thank you for being with us. Give yourselves a round of applause. And last but not least, the endlessly patient and incredibly adept crew from the San Francisco Public Library, John, Kenny, Mike. I don't know what I'd do without you guys. We've been working together for a long time now, and I still just really look forward to it. Thank you all. Take care.