 This is Essex Hemphill. He's an activist or he wasn't an activist and poet. He was born in 1957 in Chicago and he passed in 1995, which was also the year that we lost EZE, both of them to the AIDS epidemic. I'd like to read Essex Hemphill's poem, The Tomb of Sorrow. When I die, honey child, my angels will be tall black drag queens. I will eat their stockings as they fling them into the blue shadows of dawn. I will suck their purple lips to anoint my mouth for the utterance of prayer. My witnesses will have to answer to go-go music. Dancing and sweat will be required at my funeral. Someone will have to answer the mail I leave, the messages on my phone service. Someone else will have to tend to the aching that drove me to seek soul. Everything different tests my faith. I have stood in places where the absence of light allowed me to live longer, while at the same time it rendered me blind. I struggle against plagues, plots, pressure, paranoia. Everyone wants a price for my living. When I die, my angels immaculate black diva drag queens, all of them sequined and seductive. Some of them will come back to haunt you. I promise, honey child.