 So I'm going to, I want to start up with a piece that I dedicate to Michelle and so I write the, I write from these rituals called Sematics and they come out of the fact, I'm just going to be very brief with this, I was raised in a factory town in rural Pennsylvania and oh, I just, I wanted nothing to do with this factory town, I saw, I saw pretty early on my grandmother had a shelf in her living room with artwork from all of her nine daughters and sons and I, but the artwork, you know, little paintings and pieces of pottery and I asked her, I said, well, everything on the shelf, they did when they were five so where is the work they're doing now? And she said, they don't have time for art, they're busy working and I thought, oh, I have to get out of here. And so I didn't, you know, I felt pretty good about my decision moving to Philadelphia. No, really, it was great. I loved it. I was writing from, for about 20 years from the mid eighties to about and then when 2005 rolled around, I went back out for a family reunion and, you know, it was whatever, it was just, it was dreadful and whatever, but nothing that unusual happened at the reunion except, you know, it was just, it was just that of the train ride home is when I started thinking about what I was doing and I realized that I had turned everything that I was doing into a factory the way I was writing. I had seeped into my work and I was horrified by this and as soon as I got home, I looked at, I threw up on my door. I just couldn't believe it and I wanted to see my desk and I could see it. I could see the factory on the desk what I was doing. The way I was writing, the way I was getting poems ready for magazines and all that shit you do and I just hated it and so for about about a month, I stopped writing and I started making a list one morning of the problems with the factory and that is a very long list. If you have anybody in your family who works in factories, you know what the factories do to your to your family members. It just destroys them and so I could see what was happening and this is a long list that manifold it back into itself and but at the top of that list was the phrase the inability to be present and that was what I went after. So for the next seven days, I wrote a single color, a single poem a day while eating a single color of food, red, orange, yellow, green, purple and white. I ended with white because the EPA had just finished the study of finding asbestos all over lower Manhattan after everybody had been lying about asbestos in the World Trade Centers, but that's a whole other story. But it worked. That was the great thing. It worked. I created this place of extreme present with the rituals and I loved it and it changed my life immediately and I had the great honor and pleasure of going with Michelle and a lot of other people to Mexico for the radar retreat and I just couldn't believe how beautiful this was. So I did a ritual down there where I would wake up every morning and listen to a different print CD from beginning to end and mix prints into my dreams that I did this dream therapy to remember my dreams and I loved prints coming into my dreams and then I would go down to the beach and I would sit a foot closer to it. I went down there for nine days so I measured how many feet to the surf and I had a special, I did research to get a special kind of ink and paper so that I, you know, because the last day I was riding in the break the water was, I was right where the waves were breaking and it was so exciting to rate inside the break and I had this crystal that I would put in and the crystal would, these little silver fish that live in the water, the breakwater would come in and surround and kiss my crystal. But that's, there were other things I did but that's, but then so that we take notes then while doing these things and then the notes were put into poems and so I'm gonna read just a few of those poems for Michelle. We love you, Michelle. We're all gonna give her a standing ovation at the end of this, right? I was trying to get you to do it in the beginning. We got to do it. Let's do it now. Fuck that. We love you. Like various liquids after a cock fight, replete is not a word a cockroach would use but she is often a satisfied. One person is killed by gun a day in Philadelphia, a strange relief when on vacation even still if we were on a desert island I would kill you and eat you immediately. I would win. I would win. I would win. Sort of act like Paul Bearer was sofa cushion. He's straight. So I guess he's not in the fat guys. Maybe he hates my poems but my poems are fucking awesome. Is there more death or semen in my first book? I'm afraid to calculate. Fuck anyone who hates my poems. No, no, you assure me. He likes your poems. He's just straight. What a pig headed inflexible world. That was this really lovely man who was showing us the, remember he was helping the baby turtles run to the water and which was really nice until the frigate birds would come down and eat them off the surface right over. Act like administered by syringe to the dying. You ask if I'm a man or a woman. You only know how to talk to men to women making me a small, wild room. I'm intensely acutely, exceptionally and then exceedingly. Oh, you say now you don't annoy me in the morning, the afternoon or evening. I have no annoyance free home. It's all breaking up on the phone. No, not the signal. Us, us, us. What else sails backwards through my throat but your name. Kota Monty Center, golden twilight, betting against the wild, surviving our efficiency. Act like flowers pulling his petals out. Let me know if you need anything. I'm here to serve you. And just so you know, we're having a sale on our newest model. It's very nice. It's where your hand gets held through the difficult currents. Later, the small ones seem bigger. But our test results show that everyone who hangs in there winds up a jar of their former top secret desires. So please let me know if you need anything. No idea what the fuck that poem means. Act like polka dot on Minnie Mouse's skirt. I am not a family friendly faggot. I tell your children about war, about their tedious future careers. All the taxes bank rolling a racist tyrannical military. I'm the faggot at dinner, asking to be alone with children. Tell them their future happiness depends entirely on how well they cultivate rebellion against any structure that does not hold their autonomy and creative intelligence as a priority. Children, your bliss is at stake. Children, listen carefully for the lies your parents tell you. Children, prepare for joy in ways none of them will ever imagine prepared to live with no regrets. So this is a tiny new book that the artist Jason Dodge just published. I had a boyfriend named Mark Holmes. He had changed his name to earth. And he was an environmental and an AIDS activist who was murdered in 1998 in Tennessee. And if there's a queer community down there that he was living with at the time, and he was kind of burned out. He was working with a gardener. And he was well, he was bound and gagged, raped, covered in gasoline and burned alive. And the police who either didn't want to deal with hate crime, or they knew who did it and they were trying to protect them, or they just didn't care about faggots covered up this crime. And they wrote his death down as a suicide. And I had I had a hard time. It was hard enough dealing with the fact that somebody you love has been brutally assaulted and murdered. But dealing with the police, it was so horrible. I mean, the sheriff in particular at the time, the sheriff, by the way, is now that sheriff from 98 is now in prison. That's a whole other story. He's a creep. And and his deputies. And yeah, and the and the district attorney from back then was disbarred and fired for corruption. So I was just dealing with a bunch of pigs that were doing nothing. And like the sheriff would say to me on the phone from Philly, he would say he just didn't want me to come back down there and start this all over again. He said, Listen, faggot, you just stay up there in Philadelphia. If you come down here again, faggot, I'm going to arrest you and you know, on and on. But there's a film crew, a film house called Delinquent Films, they're making a documentary about my books and life. And they didn't exactly believe me. I think in the beginning that he was murdered because the police said that I was fucking nuts. And then they spoke to the coroner and then they spoke to the paramedics and they all were like, there's just not, you know, four year old could tell you this was a homicide. So and the death certificate says the victim's death was caused by the inhalation of the accelerant, etc. And so I've started to change. I did several of these rituals trying to deal with my trauma around this and it wasn't working. And then finally, this one was amazing. And I'm very happy. These are new pieces. The last time I saw Earth, he gave me a crystal that had been on hit that he had been carrying around for about a year and a half every day. And I took that I didn't touch that crystal after he was murdered for many years, because it was like a force field around it, like I can't touch this thing. And then I started putting it in my hair wrap. And every morning, it was at McDowell Colony in New Hampshire. And, and this very angry movie that had been in my head for 15 years, where it's this invention where they catch the murderers and there's a courtroom drama, it looks like this room a little bit. And not real, I mean, not you, but you know, and I'm angry through the whole film. And but the film vanished about a week and a half into working with this crystal, and it has not returned. So it does work. I believe, I think there's been this dirty rumor and poetry in the last 30 years, that first of all, there's this sort of misogyny behind this whole idea of philosophy needing to buttress poetry that poetry is too weak, too feminine to stand on its own. And I think poetry is strong. So fuck you. First of all, and second, I firmly believe that poetry can heal us. And this worked for me. I'm just gonna read a few of these. So it's called Mount Medadinox transmissions, the ritual. And then the poems are titled, Sharky of the Bird Cage. Quote, if a poem is a prayer that it rise out of my hair, unquote, Robert Seidel, a beautiful moving target is all you wanted to be aspiring future wilderness. You must know by now of the dark quiver my wand genius shot back through same hole. Not everything allows for indulgence analogous to being open by morning fall forward, fall conjuring, tell the farmer we cannot taste his milk but wish to. So one of the things I was doing was also taking a very small, soft, crisp look, you know, I mean, it was like not sharp. It was it was tumbled and I would swallow it every morning, and then shit it out and then take it out of the toilet and then sanitize and then eat it again and shit it out. And so I'm getting I'm doing this crystal cleansing and I'm giving a presentation at McDowell and one of the directors was there and she said afterwards she's like, you mean you've been shitting crystals here at McDowell. And I said, yeah. And she said, that's awesome. So I validation envelop crystals, swallow crystal, thrust crystal up my ass to distract from 10,000 worries. Few things tire me more than imagining reincarnation, a child struggling all over again to not favor war, not surrender to greed, a finger in the web to give it back 10 fold. Holding our gourds fragment is promised to change if we want change. Another evening of faults are under the chrysalis. A wayward protein bloodletting from unforeseen orifice gathers us to elongate a grass fed hours falling victim to the song and it's silk encasing too urgent for punctuation coping with an inferior century foaming over the rim. A smile hanging on the face as though it will pay off. But then it does pay off. We didn't think we could open up like this. Here we are living in the better place to know. The mountain throat temple is our uncontrollable humming from meditating on mountain mad knock paint over the dead end sign. Our police writers. Yes, they are writing into books our little cherub of misunderstanding of thinking to push us back into body of the whole. Love yourself more next time their reports read stone sink as they please a lit cigarette and our dark hello. So I want to read. So I've recently published for the Poetry Foundation this just days ago this essay on Whitman. And I as a young queer person Whitman was very important to me. And like a lot of people I had naps and a soft beard grandpa poet. And then somebody started to show me the race unbelievably racist things he wrote throughout his life, like completely hateful things about people of color calling African Americans baboons. And and and saying that Native Americans and African Americans will be eliminated because he had this crazy idea about eugenics that that you know, he assumed that Darwin meant that they should all be wiped out with like eight off Hitler. And so I was like, fuck you Walt Whitman forever. Just fuck it. I don't care anymore. I'm just I have and you know what? It's like everybody. So I've been getting a lot of hate mail. And sometimes it's just people wanting to say but what about this like they just can't like I understand that like is this real? You know, like I remember reading this like is this possible? You know, somebody recently said, oh, you're so Victorian. You want all the morality, you know, to be around these people. And I was like, no, dude, actually fuck you because Walt Whitman is the one who wanted us to think that with his little fairy godmother poems. Meanwhile, he's writing these essays that are just crazy saying that black people should not be allowed to vote because they have the consciousness of monkeys, you know, things like that, like no. And then I said, and then people were saying to me, well, but that's the way things were in the time period back in the 19th century. Everybody was reading on blah, blah, blah. I said, oh, okay, well, let's go with your logic. Okay. So how about people in early 20th century Germany who hated Jewish people? So we just say, well, the Holocaust, you know, it's like, well, that's what the way they were feeling that way about they were in a bad mood. You know, like fuck all this timeline excuse bullshit. Like getting grandma on board, like you were saying, get it up here. So I'm this is for the haters, you know, I'm in this is a this is some because I'm, you know, like, you know, you just you have haters, and there's just you just have to deal with it or, and you know, and it's good being a queer who got persecuted as a teenager because I have like all these skills for being like Teflon about it like, okay, pig, bring it on, you know. So this is the ritual is titled, you don't have what it takes to be my nemesis. So I'm going to read the ritual and the resulting poem to the friend that so these are real things that happened to the friend you thought was a friend until they tried to sabotage the publishing opportunity to the one who ripped your book in half on stage, then wrote patronizing letters to the newspaper about how you should be writing and the poets you should be reading to become a real poet to the creep who deleted your MP3 file because your reading was better than his. There are others lying conniving, envious sour pusses without the courage to be loyal to the love of friends and shared ideas. But finally to the worst of all, to the one you love the most, your trusted collaborator, the one who wrecked true havoc, the gifted sociopath, the one you always dreaded, but they found you that one, the best liar you ever met who took a machete to your life, their drama akin to opera. Even still, they are given the parting words, you don't have what it takes. Take notes about each of them for the poem, their names are unimportant, as such cowards are rarely remembered. Create a line of tiny photographs of their faces on your computer, all in a row, then print it out. This will be the rolling paper for a cigarette. Cover their faces with equal amounts of the following dried ingredients, fennel seeds, pine needles, rose petals, mugwort, basil, white sage, red sandalwood powder, perique tobacco and marijuana. These ingredients qualm negative thoughts shift gears for transformation and also invoke prophetic dreams, clairvoyance, happiness, honesty, peace of mind, and marijuana because you put up with a lot of shit and deserve to enjoy yourself. Roll it up, keep track of which enemy you are smoking, but smoke them all smoke them all sucking their faces into your lungs while writing notes for the poem. Notes about the ones who didn't have what it takes to beat you down the ones who never deserved your friendship in the first place, exhaling their faces on a braid of smoke is more satisfying than the usual forms of forgiveness. Find your poem in the notes and utterly relish your day. So the poem is titled, I feel so lonely when you touch me. Like most people ghosts want listeners, inquiring gender of tree quaking in shade rips your collar to pieces. We meet ourselves whole at same time, order of the way some will ruin themselves, gentleness thrust into a clean glass, IDS, yes, angling a wider indulgence, you and your broken pencil, right, it's a writing world, but do get on with it. Listen to blood of trees and viewing interest rate with sunshine, suffering past to a hired hand. So I want to read a new poem that my mother contacted me, I'm on the road doing this huge project right now, across the nation where I listen to extinct animal sounds, you know, 52% of all the wild animals have vanished in the past 30 years, we found out last September with the World Wildlife Fund, Planet Index report horrifying news. So there are there are field reports and I've been saturating myself with these wherever I go and sleeping in Walmart parking that's called from Whitman to Walmart. I started women's races front door and scumbag and then I go across the nation and sleep in Walmart because I believe Walmart is the best example of the results of his love of manifest destiny. And but my mother called me up in late March and she said, happy, happy, half century. I said, mom, my birthday is January 1st. She's like, I know that's and she was a little high with breakfast, a little, you know, and I said, so I thought there was something with that, you know, but she's like, no, this was the day you were conceived silly. I was like, Oh, okay, cool. So I, I was in Kansas and I did this thing. I was born in Topeka, Kansas. I did this there for my half century, whatever. My faggot Kansas blood confessions to the earth for amboire. And a Kansas field I spent several hours bearing my feet in the soil while listening to insects, birds and cars on the highway beyond the trees. I was born January 1st 1966 at the 838th Tactical Hospital Ford Forbes Air Force Base of Topeka, Kansas. My mother said the doctor held me by my ankles and announced, another fine soldier for Jesus. And I say, fuck you to those first words said to me, my mother ate food grown on this land when I was inside her. We drank from the same aquifer. The sky was as big as it is today. I took notes for the poem I dug a hole and deposited shit, piss, vomit, blood, phlegm, hair, skin, fingernails, semen and tears. And in that order, I apologize for being alive. I apologize for the animals I shot and killed to prove I could provide dinner. I apologize for having no answers on how to stop the hyper militarized racist police on the streets of America, while the racist US military is on the streets of Arab nations. I apologize for paying taxes that purchase the bullets, bombs and drones. I am a citizen of the United States. My nation is guilty of war crimes. I apologize for not convincing my queer sisters and brothers. They're repealing don't ask don't tell was putting a sympathetic face on a multi trillion dollar military industrial complex. I apologize for not finding a way to protect Chelsea Manning. I apologize for not preventing my boyfriend Mark from moving to Tennessee where his murder is awaited. I am a citizen of the United States. My nation is guilty of hate crimes. I apologize for many things for a long while then I covered the hole with my offerings and took more notes for the poem. The poem is titled my faggot blood on his fist. The first time someone sent Homer through the internet dot dot dot. We are all falling in love while standing in line for death. Fuck this way we slowly adjust to suffering and aunt finding her way home in the downpour. Lovers are weapons subjugating your heart if you smell them years after they die. If you feel destroyed let us talk do not turn it off yet. We dreamed our obliteration for centuries. Then Hollywood said this is what it will look like or maybe this or maybe this. You think it's everyone's job to make you feel good which is why we all hate you. The disgraced hairdresser pours us another shot. We will figure it out my friend. The ocean is never far when you feel your pulse. I want to end with one piece that I wrote. It's from my new book. It's the first piece I wrote it in anticipation of the 30th anniversary of inventing my gender neutral name C. Conrad and it's called M.I.A. escalator for Jen Benka and Carol Miracov and I'm going to read the ritual in the poem. I wrote several of my favorite escalators in Philadelphia taking notes up and down the advantages. At the top and bottom of the ride I would show photographs of myself to strangers and ask excuse me have you seen this person? Sometimes there was confusion. Isn't that you? I'd reply no. Many people think I look like her but have you seen her? I feel very fortunate to been born before the ultrasound machine. My generation was the last generation to have a male and female named waiting at the other end of the birth canal. My generation is the last to have our mothers touch their bellies talking to us as male and female pink or blue both pink and blue. Have you seen this person? I enjoyed my conversations with strangers and made at least one new friend. A handsome man who knew I was the person in the photograph that person I am that person and agreed. The ultrasound machine gives the parents the ability to talk to the unborn by their gender taking the intersex nine month conversation away from the child. The opportunities limit us in our new world. Encourage parents to not know. Encourage parents to allow anticipation on either end. Escalators are a nice ride slowly rising and falling, riding while riding, notes for the poem meeting new people. Excuse me my escalator notes became a poem. My poem is titled I hope I'm loud when I'm dead. I have a mannequin for a paperweight. It is difficult to type with such a large paperweight. I reach around lovers late into night typing. From behind, it is impossible to tell which is Virgil. Poetry can be of use. The field of flying bullets the hand reaches through loving the aftertaste finding a deeper third taste. Many are haunted by human cruelty through the centuries. I am haunted by our action since breakfast. You said too much poetry. I said too much war. The biggest mistake for love is straining. There was a door marked mistake we entered. You said too much falling around. I said fuck off and die. Thank you.