 Just because you have written this book, it does not mean that you can or will find it any easier to read your words out loud. You write this poem in preparation for the future for when you will find yourself encountering an audience. Perhaps the people inside your book are sitting in this audience. Perhaps their presence will make you think twice about any attempt at reclaiming your voice. You place this poem on page 62, not quite the center, but a number you know you will never forget. You will always know where to go should you find yourself thinking that you are better off being silent. You're born on this date and as such you believe that each time you read the poem on this page, you are reborn in that instance to begin again. You tell your story. It is a familiar story. This is your story. You share it in the hopes of it becoming our story. This is our story about how we as human beings treat one another. It is an acutely human story. Your friend tells you that as a child or a teenager or even as a young man, he grew up thinking he had no race. That such a concept was beyond his comprehension. Your friend tells you this as a way of saying things are different for him now. In the same conversation you tell your friend that even as a child and a teenager and even now in this moment, you were always made aware of who you are. It begins with the color of your skin. You tell your friend this as a way of saying things have always been this way, but you as a person are different now. That moment when you, the reader of this book, will question the reason for why it was written when you are questioning the author's intent, the obsessive nature of recounting each detail. That moment when you accept the story as truth, when you are implicated for acknowledging this truth, they are your colleagues, they are your friends, they are your teachers. That moment when you choose to reject the truth, when the you in this moment is determined by you. You are writing this book for the simple fact that someone, somebody, some group of people did something to you. You write it as a way of saying you will not put up with this, not ever again. You will not hold, you will not carry the weight of their actions. You will not accept their transference of shame. You accept it. You accept the reality of this as truth that history is often written from the perspective of the perpetrator or that silence is said from the voice of the voiceless. You are writing this book for these simple truths. You have a voice. You are claiming your voice. You have a history. This is your history. These things, they are just things. They are told all, they are, I'm sorry, these things, they are just things. You are told all your life to develop a thick skin that you should not take these things so seriously. These things, these moments, they are just things in the greater scheme of things. So what if you are consistently called by your last name? It is easier to pronounce. It is just a small thing. These things, they accumulate, they stick, they cling to your clothing, your skin. They alter your thinking. They affect your seeing, your way of being. You wake up one day. You look in the mirror. You have grown a thick skin. And the you in the mirror is no longer you. One day, in the third period on the first day of class, you decide to change your name to Tom. You do not care for the name, not in the slightest. It is easy to spell. It is easy to say. You will have plenty of time to regret your choices. It is just the thing you tell yourself. You carry these things. They are placed on you. They are thrown at you. You walk through life. You are carrying these things. You anticipate a time when someone is compelled to correct your grammar. Again, it happens. And you collapse under the weight. You are buried beneath a lifetime of these things. I almost deleted this piece because someone I quoted on Facebook wrote to me and kind of called me out and said, Did you really write about me and can you explain yourself? And I almost followed suit and deleted it. And then I thought about it and I said, Fuck that. This isn't about him. So you are minding your own business, minding the business of Facebook. When you come across a writer crowdsourcing, what appears to be a simple enough question. Hi, Facebook friends. Does anybody know any good writing about anger and outrage? Already got Spinoza, thanks. Spinoza and Kendrick Lamar. I'm mad, but I ain't stressed. Thanks, you crazy lovable motherfuckers. You feel your fingers wanting to respond. You don't want to be seen as that guy. Yes, that guy. You hear yourself saying what the, did he really just say ask? Maybe it's you. Maybe you have become overly sensitive in your old age. Maybe you need a trigger warning. The logical you insist that you acknowledge the innocuous nature of this posting. When did his question about writing and anger and outrage fill you and your words with the same anger and outrage? It is the same. It is, it is, it is the same. It is because, is it the same? Is it because you are reminded of your friend, Wanda, who left this life not too long ago? You missed her voice the time over dinner when she said those motherfuckers. You will always remember the rage in that voice. Is it because writing for you is a matter of rage? You think to yourself, this is so obvious. This is not meant to be logical in the least. It is because, is it because you were afraid of looking and then you looked and now you cannot stop looking. You are triggered by a question written in a hurry. It is, it is perhaps not meant for you. It is a question asked by a white dude to other white dudes in a matter of, it is a matter of perspective. Ask, matter of perspective. His and yours, it is a matter, it is, it matters, it matters. He is asking a question as a matter of intellect. You are answering it as an instance, in this instance as a matter of necessity. Is it because you are dying to ask what are you really asking? He pulls the trigger not once but five times. Is it because you live in a world where an unarmed black man running the other way is seen as dangerous and always endangered? Is it because of the way the question is written? He is trying to be poetic. Is he trying to be funny? You crazy, lovable motherfuckers. Clearly, this must be striking a nerve. Did it offend your sensibilities? You tell yourself, if you can't, can just stop looking. If you can close your eyes, maybe just maybe you will hear your friend whispering, those motherfuckers. Your colleague and one-time mentor writes to you after months of silence. She says, I've been thinking about you, hoping you're well if you'd ever like to meet for lunch or tea or anything. I'm here, such a simple note and yet you find yourself short of breath. You think that someone sees you after all this time. You think your voice is finding its way back. You hesitate to respond. You wait a day, you send her a note that says, thank you for this note. It means a lot to me. I would love to have tea. You wait a day, a week, a month goes by. You wait, you wait, you settle back into silence. This is a poem about someone who gifted me something amazing. Your student gives you a bag full of cranes, not a handful or a hundred or even a thousand. Your student gives you a garbage bag size full of cranes. The numbers are unknown and knowing is the art. You decide to make art to honor her obsession. You install an artwork with an unknown quantity of cranes. You are asked to articulate the Asian-ness of the cranes. It is a Japanese tradition. You say you're Vietnamese, your student is Vietnamese. You object to the simple framing of your ethnicity. You say you're exploring obsession as art and still you are asked to explain your Asian-ness as art. You say you're exploring this obsession as art. Your gay and proud neighbor makes you a gay and proud neighbor. He tells you that he's clearing out his life. He gives you a box of vintage gay porn filled and sorted. Each sorted detail is lovingly saved, labeled in files of small, medium, large, extra large. You take it, you keep it, you store it in your basement next to a stack of old nature calendars. Someday you think, someday, and then one day months later, you hear from a neighbor that your neighbor passed away. You read about a famous artist who killed 9,000 butterflies. He titles the piece in and out of love. He calls it art. You think to yourself, what a fucking asshole. You think to yourself, this one's for you, Joe. You cut 9,000 butterflies out of assholes and nature and dicks of all sizes. You tend to react through the act of making, you know this about yourself. You make art out of 9,000 paper butterflies cut from images of nature, assholes and dicks of all sizes. This, you know, you call it art. And this is about my fourth grade encounter with language. Something happens and you commit it to memory. That time in the fourth grade you use the wrong word. Your teacher says she has a headache. You as a fourth grader are amassing a vocabulary. You want to show off your newest word. Like a rare red cat's eye in a bag full of marbles, you say it's a tumor. You catch your teacher off guard. You can tell from her reaction she is both hurt and angry. She says that's a rude thing to say. You can sense in that moment as a fourth grader, she did not say this as a teacher. There was no teaching in her voice, even with your hand raised. She did not call on you for the remainder of the lesson that day. Her comments stay with you throughout the day. You arrive home that afternoon. You're still wondering what happened. You look up the word headache in your sister's Webster dictionary. You panic. You look up the word tumor. You write your teacher a letter in cursive. The letter reads, dear Mrs. Brooks, I'm sorry for saying you have a tumor. I meant to say you have a migraine. And I'm going to end with a poem. And I'm going to preface this by saying that sometimes poets say the damnedest things. Some dude not too long ago got up in front of an audience and read the autopsy of Michael Brown as a poem. I mean, what the fuck? So I need it to respond to that. So this is about ownership. That even in his death, a black man is at risk. That his body will be appropriate in the name of your avant-garde art, experimental poetics, conceptual poetry, call it what you will. It has always been about ownership. The black body, the white body, the owner and the owned. This is where the poetry ends because I will not engage you as a poet. I did not give a fuck that you teach at a university or that you have tenure or that you are privileged or white or that the black president of white America invited you into his house. I want you to know that if I see you walking down the street, I will exercise my right of ownership. I will claim that space of three by three land, call it homesteading, call it squatter's rights. I will claim that minor plot of land in the middle of a street, on the sidewalk in a cafe. I will claim it as my own so that I can do what comes next. I will kick you in the gonads. I'm a short man and you are a tall man from what I can see in your many photos. If I do this just right, it will cause the effect of you hunching over. Our eyes will meet in that fleeting second, and I will look at you as I punch you in the face, right around your left eye. Your body will topple to the ground. You will lay on that plot of three by three land, clutching your balls with one hand and your eye with the other, and you will say something stupid like, why did you do that? As if you didn't know. And I will be hovering over your body. I will read these words in your annoying poet voice. I will move in that same rhythmic pattern that you must have practiced in the mirror for hours and hours. Later, when they come to arrest me in the comfort of my own home, I will say that I did it as a poetic gesture of the avant-garde. As a poem, the reader is invited into the metaphor. Thank you.