 I'm Dee Allen from District 9 for at least one more day. I'm going to be moving from San Francisco for good tomorrow. I've been in this city for 12 years, and it's been very good to me. But all that comes to an end when I put everything that I own, including the books, including books that my work has appeared in, into totes and boxes onto a moving van. And all that is because District 9 is undergoing further, and I do mean further, redevelopment. And every single week, I see two or three U-Haul vans per week in my neighborhood alone of just somebody just packing up their personal possessions and leaving the city. Because the real estate, the regular rents, have gone through the roof around here. No thanks to entry of the information technology industry that Mayor Ed Lee has invited into this town. And I'm one of the casualties. I have three poems published in this book. I'm going to read you one of them on page 136 of Poets 11, 2015. This is an elegy to a poet who inspired me to pick up the pen and write my own work. This is for Amiri Baraka. This is called Shining Star. I don't have too much time to just sitting around counting stars. I have to be in another part of town to accomplish that. Alone, hiking around a dark, burnal hill with a flashlight, I could see the stars above much better than I could in the mission's drastic urban change below. One shining star is missing from the ebony sky. The hole it left is untraceable. I followed that star's brilliant shine for over 20 years. Caught by its halogen luminance, that star inspired me to craft poems that kill, wrestle cops and alleys, make me feel and be me, shake off to the best of my ability madness and dead skull songs. Transform my homespun writing into implements that splinter fire, encourage me to keep, keep throwing hard, keep on punching and never let my enemies dodge once. Use my scrawl verses in a daily struggle that transcends class as my beautiful people would Africanize, nose and arms. Half a century's wanting sun to plenty in a vast land where he thens. I think fascism is civilization and luxury is in everyday comfortable ignorance. In the slums, projects and blue collar suburbs, there's always a railroad made of hella human bones, black ivory, black ivory, black ivory. When the situation worsens, lovers and warriors and their sons should unite and come out fighting its conditions, even when the devil with the blue uniform or the badge shows up in a hot Harlem minute. It's nation time, it's nation time, it's nation time. One shining star is missing from the ebony sky. The hole it left is untraceable. That star disappeared, joining shining stars of the past in the endless void, a parallel sky of sorts like others that came before that star unique. Newark Street Kid, Beatnik, Kuwaita, Communist, not anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist, more spirit than ghost, born Everett Leroy Jones, renamed Blessed Prince. Inspired me to pick up the pen and fill notebooks with words that still move the people. That poem was called, Shining Star on page 136 of Poets 11, 2015. I'm D. Allen, you're the president. Thank you.