 I have the music stand, I feel like Doodamel or something, it's just, the first hundred days after your heart has been snapped, the first hundred days after you spend three straight days crying, after your heart has been snapped, you're out of tears but you feel their echo in your body, you're vulnerable, out of touch with order, and just hella angry. This president gives me a just got my heart snapped feeling. Apparently he's doing the same thing to, like everybody around me, I live in Oakland, so like everybody, which makes the whole world feel kind of zombie-ish. Between the visas, the wall, the health care repeal, and the Goldman Sachs cabinet, the fictional maskers, the accusations of wiretapping and Kaepernick, the actual alliances with Nazis and fascists, the Muslim band, Flynn's sessions, Kushner, the homie-comie, can't hear the screams from your island while he's on his island on a golf course, DeVos, Dodd-Frank, the Yemen attack, Kellyanne, Faxol, Toad, Bolingreen, and Sweden, abandoning freedom of the press and banning tiny orange hands on the button, a glutton, a constitution-gutton, social safety net-cutting, Kaiser, Heil, Comrade Gromf, Scalia-Thinker-like, justice-nominating, self-hating, pedophilic, rapist climate science debating, ruling via tweets. Can't fucking tweet at North Korea, doll. Has it been a year yet? Because this is emotionally unsustainable. And because all the therapists that I trust are traumatized too, I am seeking balance by turning off the news and listening instead to the corpses begin to speak. I'm finding refuge in the vigilance of resistance dreams resurrecting themselves. Black Jesus didn't walk on water from me to wine. Hell, Black Jesus come down the steps to meet his betrayer at the door as would the restless dead. I can't plug in too much to the interweb. I'm tuned in to the ghosts in my head instead. And maybe that makes me crazy. But what this thing we got here is supposed to be normal. This punishment society based on a logic of exclusion, a crisis of knowledge run by a narcissist prone to delusion. If he's saying, well, Barack Hussein, call me crazy. But I'm gonna be right here in this corner, 100 days and running, rhyming spook riddles to myself, preserving mental health by clinging to the talking spirits. Summon the perfect imprint of the genetic memories of the best of us. Birth a nation of black thought. Listen in to the ringing silence after four little girls were bombed where they prayed like the Charleston nine or the night in Vegas that silence 58 to the non believers in the congregation. Be careful. The wrath of this president's buried corpses. They joined the choir of this country's multicolored trampled. I'd advise you to stay sane by thumping the thunderous paranormal base booming like the music of Jordan Davis before a racist shot him in the face. I listened to the melody of the after death memory of that young boy. I won't be dizzy in this all reality. I am steady. I am steadied by the genetic memory. I am a child of the sugarcane sharpened like a spear to break my ancestors chains. Take 100 days. Look into the fire and remember Egypt walk home in the rain and remember Trayvon when the train goes underground. Think of Tubman bring my hands up to alleluia like Mike Brown black out in a purple haze like maybe what you watching is a poet possessed. Maybe I'm not rhyming. I'm just out of my head. Maybe the spirit of this body has left and you're listening to creation manifest instead intuition indigenous to the intellect of the dead a lightning rod a breathing on bleeding profusely through the unsaid black out in a purple haze on top of red clay invoke the infinite like the color of my true love's hair be true. Be love what I'm supposed to like forget my capacity to conjure the world. What I'm just supposed to like give up the ghost. This dude is assist but the disease is buried blue vein red blood white supremacist skin deep oil dollars over rain forest green buried like the voices in a New Orleans mortuary. Sometimes it takes a little longer than expected but I'm putting myself on a fast 100 days of ghost listening. They've healed me before when my heart was snapped and they gave me the strength I needed to sanely humanely clap the back. Thank you for coming in out of this beautiful sunny day inside into the dark. Good people and that's bad. It's strange to me sometimes how good and bad are so close together. And sometimes they hide in the same word. I've been thinking about the word poison a lot lately. You know where it comes from it comes from the word gift strangely enough. A poison was a portion was a dose and a dose was a gift. The first gift was water. It was milk was life. But we all know in the water there's poison in Flint Michigan. There's poison in the Keystone pipeline. There's poison in the air on Pennsylvania Avenue. There's poison in the Twitter feed poison in the arrogance poison in the greed, poison in the hate. What's the antidote? Part of it we know is to be woke. You cannot help if you're not aware. You can't come to the rescue if you don't hear the calls. You can't defend the truth. If you don't see the lies that spread, you can't protect from predators. You pretend aren't there. There's an old proverb that there are poisons that blind you and poisons that open your eyes. We're here because I think our eyes are open or your eyes open. But then what? You know, Tony Mars is a great novel beloved. It begins with a quote from the Bible Paul's letter to the Romans. Those who are not my people, I will call my people. And her who was not beloved, I will call beloved. It's a powerful theme in Morrison, the idea that hate, that racism lies in the fantasy, the fear, the need we have to call people other to look at them and say they're strangers. They're not us. In her new book, which I really encourage you to read, called The Origin of Others, Morrison tells a story about being a young girl and meeting her great grandmother for the first time. And she was a little girl about six or seven, and she hadn't met her great grandmother. And a great grandmother was a kind of woman. She says, where all the men in the room immediately stood up when she got there. She was a kind of woman who carried a cane she didn't need. And she saw Tony Morrison and her young sister and she pointed the cane at them. And she said, these children have been tampered with. They were light skinned. And she was, as Morrison says, the color of tar. And of course, Morrison makes clear that that sense of being wrong, being tainted, being tampered with, being poisoned comes from slavery. It's part and parcel of the deep sin of centuries of institutions and all the apparatus and culture that created it and defended and defended still. Racism, hate, the idea of foreigners, people who are not us. It's the evil that gets under the skin. And art, Morrison says, and all the people you'll hear from in the conference over the next two days will embody. Art shows us that the idea of the foreigner is poison. Art offers welcome. It can be the antidote to hate. It can be the beginning of peace. Art is about making things, making things happen, making change happen. So welcome. There are no strangers here. We're here to dilute the poison. So breathe in inside. And we hope over the next two days, you'll inspire the change and be inspired by it. Thank you. Thanks for coming.