 Let's see here. What is the appropriate poem to start out for y'all? How about the poem that's the first poem in the book? It's called What It Look Like. I actually don't read it out a whole bunch. Let me get my clock going. And if we're going to do questions, you can raise your hand in the middle of it. That's what I always hated about church. I couldn't ask the question during church. So you're sitting there and the preacher says something crazy, so I'm going to ask you about that. All right, OK. So if you have a question, if it sounds really crazy, I will stop. I will answer it. And that'll be fun, and then we'll move on. All right, so this is just called What It Look Like. There's not that much to say about it. Dear, old, dirty bastard, I too like it raw. I don't especially care for Duke Ellington at a birthday party. I care less and less about the shapes of shapes because forms change, and nothing is more durable than feeling. My uncle used the money I gave him to buy a few vials of what looked like candy after the party where my grandma sang in an outfit that was obviously made for a West African king. My motto is never mistake what it is for what it looks like. My generosity, for example, is mostly a form of vanity. A bandana is a useful handkerchief, but a handkerchief is a useless-ass bandana. This only looks like a footnote in my report concerning the party. Trill stands for what is truly real, though it may be hidden in the houses just over the hills between us, by the hands on the bars between us. That picture of my grandmother with my uncle when he was a baby is not trill. What it is is the feeling felt seeing garbage men drift along the pre-dawn avenues, a sloppy, slow rain taking its time to the coast. Milk toast is not trill, nor is bouliabase. Bakushan is Japanese for a woman who is beautiful only when viewed from behind. Like I was saying, my motto is never mistake what it looks like for what it is else you end up like that Negro Othello. Was Othello a Negro? Don't you lie about who you are sometimes and then realize the lie is true. You are blind to your power, brother bastard, like the king who wanders his kingdom searching for the king. And that's OK. No one will tell you you are the king. No one really wants a king anyway. So that was weird. I guess I could have said some stuff, like trill. Everybody knows about trill. That's trill. It's a portmanteau. Portmanteau. When you put two words together, trill. That's very trill. And what else should I have said? Yeah, Bakushan, that's true. That's what that word means. Othello, you know, he was a Moor. All right, so here's the second poem in the book. And this is the one I usually start out with. And you'll see very quickly how it's a very different kind of poem than the previous one. The only thing they share is the befuddlement. So when you hear weird stuff in it. So you need to know this. Potascola, there's a few things. Potascola is a town between Pittsburgh and Columbus if you're going west. So for me, just being on the highway and seeing a town called Potascola, I thought, oh, that's got to be in a poem. So that's why it's there. And then the other thing, the poem is sort of about a drive and then seeing something happen to a deer. But the other thing you should know about it is the muscadine, which I'm sure doesn't get up to Minnesota. Y'all know about the muscadine? So that's in there. And so it's just like this little berry. The joke I tell is that they can probably sell it in whole foods in Minnesota. But in South Carolina, it just is like a weed. It just grows on the side of the road. So they have muscadine wine. And it's actually a little bit nasty and salty. But I don't even know if it gets up above, say, North Carolina or maybe by Virginia even, it can't sort of grow in those terrains. So whenever I read it out, I got to tell people, muscadine, look forward and hold foods. $5 a berry. All right, so that's it. That's all you got to know. The deer. Outside Potascola, I saw the deer with a soft white belly. The deer with two eyes as blind as holes. I saw a leap from a bush beside the highway as if a moment before it left, it had been a bush beside the highway. And I saw how, if I wished it, I could be the deer, or creature bony as a branch in spring. And when I closed my eyes, I found the scent of muscadine. The berry, my mother plucked sundaes from the roadside where fumes toughened its speckled skin and seed slept suspended in a mucus thick as the sleep of an embryo. It is the ugliest berry along the road. But chewed, it reminded me of speed. And I saw, when I was the deer, that I didn't have to be a deer. I could become a machine with a woman inside it, moving at a speed that leaves a stain on the breeze and on the muscadine's flesh, which is almost meat, the sweet pulp of muscadine leaves when it's crushed in the teeth of a deer, or a mother for that matter, or her child waiting with something like shame to be fed a berry uglier than shame. Though it is not like this for the deer, it is not shame because the deer is not human. It is only almost human when it looks on the road and leaps covering at least 30 feet in a blink. The deer, I cannot be, the dumb deer, dumb and foolish enough to ignore anything that runs but is not alive. A trafficking machine filled with a distracted mind and body deadly and durable enough to deconstruct a deer when it leaps, I'm telling you like someone being chased. I remember a friend told me how when he was eight or nine, a half-naked woman ran to the car window crying her man was after her with a knife, but his mother locked the doors and sped away. Someone tell him his mother was not a coward. That's what he thinks. Tell him it was because he and his little brother were in the car that she would not let the troubled world inside. It was no one's fault. The mind separated from the body. I could almost see the holes of her eyes. The white fuzz on her tongue. The raised buds soft as a bed of pink seeds. The hold of a mouth stretched wide enough to hold a whole baby inside. I could almost see its eyes at the back of her throat. I could definitely hear its cries. So what I'll tell you about that one is that do not ask any questions. Because I can't answer them. Sometimes I can write a poem. Like in the first poem, there's a fellow and at the end, and it's not everybody's gonna know, ODB, I should just say, I just assume everybody knows who Old Dirty Bastard is. Only certain of us in the audience will know. If you don't know who Old Dirty Bastard is, it's exactly what it sounds like. Somebody whose name should be Old Dirty Bastard. That's the last poem. So we had Old Dirty Bastard, and then at the end when I do a fellow and then I say, you are blind to your power, brother bastard, like the king who wanders his kingdom searching for the king, y'all know who that is. All the English major, that's King Lear. But I never say it, right? I don't so, so there's Old Dirty Bastard. Some people will know that, and then some people will be like, oh, there's a King Lear reference. He didn't actually say King Lear. We move on, so I can explain that one. That's all I'm saying to you. The deer, I can't explain it. What's happening, the eyes in the back of the throat and the, I don't know, it just, it felt right. And I like those kinds of poems. I like the poems where I sort of can't quite explain them. I'm mostly reading from the front of the book. Here's another one. So at one point, I decided I was gonna write a poem for every state. I got the idea from Sufjohn Stevens, this other singer, he's, I mean, those of us who know who Old Dirty Bastard is and Sufjohn Stevens, we should talk. Those are people I wanna hang out with. And King Lear. So if you know one of those, you're probably a third of my friend. I got a third of interest in you. So Sufjohn Stevens had this project and so he was like, I'm gonna write a, I thought he was gonna do a record maybe, a record for every, the 50 States Project, which is ridiculous. So he did like two or three. And they're good, the Michigan one and then the Illinois, and then he got on to some other stuff. So similarly, I was like, yeah, I'm gonna do that too. So I have like a New York poem and then I did a New Jersey poem and I was done. So I'll try this one. The reason that I, you know, this is just like for your information, I guess. The reason that I'm gonna read this one is because the dude who's in that, who shows up in the deer poem is, he shows up in this poem too. So they're totally unrelated, but it's just like, you know, when you have friends who have like, I think his life is more exciting than mine. So most of the stuff he does is not even like, I can't even bring it up now, the kind of stuff that he does. And he tells me about it. And occasionally we're together. So like, here's the scenario. And I will say that the poem is, even though it's sort of even my imagination, it is, you know, it's true, but it's not fact. If you can distinguish between those two things. But the thing is, should I tell you this story before I read the poem? I'm gonna tell you. So we go to this party and in New York, this is a little hoity-toity, really sophisticated party. It had like a vice room. This is what they do in New York. So like everybody at the front, it's like we're having a good time, but if you want to get in trouble, you can go to the vice room. So that's where he was. And so I was just sitting on the couch and then every time a woman would come up to me and start talking, he would show up and be like, don't talk to her, what's your name? You know, that kind of thing. So this is my friend. So in the night, he doesn't get lucky. It's like six o'clock with the last people at the party, because he's like, okay, now those women left, let me work on these women. He just was trying to like, get hooked up. And it never worked out. I just sat on the couch, I took a nap. And then at the end of the night, he apologized and he was like, man, I'm sorry for abandoning you, trying to get hooked up, man. And I was like, man, you know what? I was half asleep, don't worry about it. And then I wrote a poem about it. New York poem. And again, those are all the facts. So this is like underneath all of that. And you'll know the moment. I was thinking about him being concerned every time a woman that I wasn't interested in wanted to have a conversation with me. So that's just peripheral to the poem. So all of that is just the stuff underneath it. So it's called New York poem. In New York, from a rooftop in Chinatown, one can see the sci-fi bridges and aisles of buildings where there are more miles of shortcuts and alternative takes than there are miles Davis alternative takes. There is a white girl who looks hijacked with feeling in her glittering jacket and her boots that look made of dinosaur skin. And R is saying to her, I love you. I love you again and again. On a Chinatown rooftop in New York, anything can happen. Someone says, abattoir is such a pretty word for slaughterhouse. Someone says, mermaids are just fish ladies. I am so fucking vain that I cannot believe anyone is threatened by me. In New York, not everyone is forgiven. Dear New York, dear girl with a barcode tattooed on the side of your face and everyone writing poems about and inside and outside the subways. Dear people underground in New York, on the sci-fi bridges and aisles of New York, on the rooftops of Chinatown where Miles Davis is pumping in and someone is telling me about contra-nems. How cleave and cleave are the same word looking in opposite directions. I now know bolt is to lock and bolt is to run away. That's how I think of New York. Someone jonesing for Grace Jones at the party and someone jonesing for Grace. So yeah, so that's all underneath it. So here's the rest of that story. So then, so I write the poem, I don't tell my mama write it and then I'm like, well, it's the New York poem, I should send it to the New Yorker. Send it now, send it to the New Yorker, of course, they take it and then it gets published and then he sees it and all the people who were at the party sees it and he says to me, man, my wife's that poem ruined my marriage, my wife saw that poem. I was like, man, your marriage was already ruined. So, so, and then he gave me a Grace Jones record at the end. Like who's looking for Grace and who's looking for Grace Jones? Oh, you know, this is just a side note. I was thinking about this when I saw this, when I wrote the poem, so when I say like the difference between fact and truth, like there was no girl, I didn't come across a girl who had a barcode tattooed on the side of her face, but you know, it's a weird enough and wild enough place that's very easy to believe, right? So I was like, what's the wildest thing I can do? Oh, I know, somebody's got a barcode tattooed on their face and then what happened? Gucci Mane got a two ice cream cone tattooed on the side of his face and that's fact. So I'm saying like, which is crazier that this dude's got an ice cream cone tattooed? Y'all probably don't know what I'm talking about Gucci Mane. Anyway, so I was like, he trumped my poem. Like I was like, I'm gonna write the most wild bizarre thing I could think of somebody with a barcode on her face and then this fool. Anyway, that's a side note. That has nothing to do with anything. So it sounds like we are talking about hip hop today. That's not what I was planning on doing, but it's sort of our theme, at least for the, I'll read this poem, which is a slightly more serious poem or intense poem. Maybe it's a rated R poem, but it looks directly at it and then I'll read y'all some other stuff because I've just been hanging around in this first section but it's thinking about, maybe it's thinking about that, like what does it mean to like a dude who would have an ice cream cone tattooed on his face? Like what does that say about me? If that's like somebody that I really like. You know what I mean? So the poem again, think about that. That's what's up underneath the poem. So and this one, not that it matters, I guess, it's the truest, the most factual of everything that I've read, which is to say like I ain't making much of it up. Oh, here's another reference in it. I know y'all don't know about this. UGK, International Players Anthem. Y'all know that? Okay, so there's a reference to that in there too. So when I say it, it's a parenthetical line. It still is the same thing, like the International Players Anthem is like a pimp's cold. The whole song is about like the life of a pimp. So that'll help if you don't know the song. But otherwise you should check it out. It's pretty good, International. It's also part of, it's such a bouncy tune and then you start thinking like, what is he saying to me? So, all right. As traffic, as traffic, sounds like the hook in a chart topper, a rapper mouths squatting like a gilded animal in the middle of a bustling boulevard of bumpers and bumping bikini rumps. Chains, chains, chains. But it is meant to conjure my half brother and the girls, the news says he'd kidnapped or persuaded with knuckles before the police rushed in, knocking him like a lover, no longer loved to the motel floor. His long arm was chained to a cell phone. The one time I met him, he called me brother and said our father had more children like us all over town. While UGK's International Players Anthem, my bitch, a choosy lover, never fuck without a rubber, bumped in the background. Foolishly, I did not think the worst of the music I adore had anything to do with having power over anyone else. The naked women as bountiful as traffic, the half naked men who cannot grow stiff without looking at reflections of themselves while the camera glares an inch from their genitals must have wanted before porn simply to play hardcore, like the hardcore rappers paid to be wrapped in chains of rhyme and the arms of women working for men who want to fill the soft pockets of everything with something of themselves. A camera swelled over the locks on my brother's body in the courtroom the way the police lights swelled over the girls he trafficked miles from money and taxed for gas back home and the protection he offered them from the belligerent Johns and when called for protection from himself. Before the judge denied bail, the ruling was on the news. Columbia Man charged with human sex trafficking. He will live in a cell with the beautiful solitude chained about his throat growing over time as permanent and illegible as what has been scratched, tooth and nail into the cells. The music I have been playing all my life is about pimps and who will be pimped. But when my daughter is listening, I play something else. All right, all right, let's see, let's go to another section. I was talking about this one. Thank you, thank you. Thank you. I was talking about this one because I was asked just about typos and poems. So this poem, Barbarism, was in the New York Times magazine. Maybe the Sunday before last. So you know that's a lot of people, a lot of people saw it. So I saw it online right before it came out in the print version. And I saw that in the poem, they had a typo. It was just one letter. So in this, you know, in my poem, I said he'd, he apostrophe D sworn to never let his hair been cut again. But in the magazine version, for whatever reason, I guess the D is next to the S. They had, he's sworn, as in present tense, he has sworn to never let his hair be cut again. So when I saw it, I was like, this is about, you know, not, you know, staying next to you, what you believe. So I was like, well, it's just one letter. You know, what does it matter? What does it matter? Of course, then I got like a little onslaught of people saying that poem makes no sense. I was like, oh, it's a D, it's not an S. I should have said something, but I didn't. So, so I feel like I ain't gotta read it and not have corrected. It wasn't a poem that I read out a whole bunch. So, and you, I guess I could say that too, just about like my approach to the poems. I do like to try to like, you know, swerve and surprise. And this poem kind of has some of that, but I, this almost didn't make it into the book because I thought it was like too sweet that makes any sense. I know that's what people think poems are supposed to be. That's just, it gets boring after a while. But I'm glad I put it in and they selected it. I didn't ask them to pick this one. So I was like, I guess it's all right, except that they screwed up one letter in it. But, you know, so, so that's why I'm gonna read it just because it's gotta be, I gotta correct it for the universe. And there's nothing, no, that's what I mean. Like I don't have to do a whole bunch of talking about what's happening in it. And so in that regard, I always think like, does that, is that really worth my time when I think about poems? But I did write it, so I guess it means something. It's called a barbarism. It was light and lustrous and somehow luckless. The hair I cut from the head of my father-in-law. It was pepper blanched and wind scuffed, thin as a blown bulb's filament. It stuck to the teeth of my clippers like a dark language. The static covering his mind stuck to my fingers. It mingled in half-hearted tufts with the dust. Because every barber's got a gift for mine reading in his touch, I could hear what he would not say. He'd sworn to never let his hair be cut again after his daughter passed away. I told him how my own boy, his grandchild, weeps when my clippers bite behind his ear. But I could not say how the blood there tastes. I almost showed him how I bowed my own head to the razor in my hands. How a mirror is used to taper the nape. Science and religion come to the same conclusion. Someday, all the hair on the body will fall away. I'm certain he will only call on me for a few more years. The crown of his head is already smoother than any part of his face. It shines like the light and tiny bulbs of sweat before the sweat evaporates. All right, so you know it's just about haircuts. Let me see how we're doing with time here. I do have one or two new things to try. Yeah, I'll do this one. Actually, it's just going to turn out, because this one too, this one's called the carpenter ant. Maybe this is the last one and I'll end up with just some newer stuff. Although I don't know if I should end on the new stuff. It might not be that good. Maybe I'll read this one and I'll end on something else in the book if I think about what it is. So this one is behind it, since we're going to do, as I said. I never know what's going to happen when I get up here. So behind this poem is actually Kendrick Lamar. But it's from when he did Thebes on a Record with BJ, that kid from Chicago, and the song is called His Pain. So you wouldn't know that. And I actually, I read this poem once and I said to the audience, anybody that knows where this reference comes from, I give $100. And then the dude did know. So I'm not going to say that, but it's changed. I changed it a little bit, but it is a line that comes up in that song, His Pain. But the poem really has nothing to do with that. It's just that when I heard the line, I don't know why God keeps blessing me. I was like, oh man, that would be fat for a poem. So I just, I put it in the poem. The carpenter ant, and it's one sentence, it's one long sentence. It was when or because she became two kinds of mad, both a nail biting into a plank and a screw cranking into a wood beam, the aunt, I shouldn't say her name, went at the fullest hour of the night, the moon there like an unflowered bulb in a darkness like mud or covered in darkness like a bulb or a skull is covered in mud. The small brown aunt who, before she went mad, taught herself to carpenter and unhinged in her madness, the walls she claimed were bugged with tiny red-eyed devices planted by the state or Satan's agents, ghost of atheists, her foes or worst, the walls were full of the bugs she believed crawled from her former son-in-laws crooked mouth. The aunt who knows, as all creatures know, you have to be rooted in something tangible as wood if you wish to dream in peace, took her hammer with its claw like a mandible to her own handmade housing humming, I don't know why God keeps blessing me, softly, madly, and I understood. I was with her when the Paul Bearers carried a box made of mahogany from her church to a hearse to a hole in the earth. It made me think of the carpenter aunt who carries within its blood an evolved self-destructive property and on its face mandibles twice the size of its body and can carry on its back as I have seen on TV a rotted bird or branch great distances to wherever the queen is buried. Kingdom Anomalia, phylum Arthropoda, tribe Camponotini, the species that lives on wood is like mud, rain, and time, the carpenter's enemy, yes. But I would love to devour the house I live in until it is a permanent part of me. I would love to shape as Peruntha Chan, the master sculptor, carpenter, and architect of India is said to have shaped a beautiful tree into the coffin in which I am to be buried. I know whatever we place in a coffin, the coffin remains empty. I know nothing buried is buried. I don't know why God keeps blessing me. I don't know why God keeps blessing me. All right, so let's try. So by the time I tell you this story for this poem, we will be out of time. So let me see if I can tell it to you really quickly. I do have like a bunch of long poems I've been working on and it's really about finding my half-brothers. And I will say, I mean, when the poems are true, they're true. So like the half-brother that's in that poem asked traffic who went to jail for human sex trafficking. I do searches for these guys because I only met them once, the two. So one time when I did a search, I found them on Myspace. So they went to Myspace once in like 2009 and they put up all of this stuff and they answered these questions about it. It was really to find women. So I found, I was like, hey, I see you guys are here, but they never went back. They never got back on the site. But then I just started writing poems around it. So this is one of those poems. And so I have a whole bunch of this stuff going, but this is the one I'm gonna try for you. So one of the questions was like, how jeet up are you? And then the questions are like, you're handing out for a question or are you yawning? Oh, I thought you had a question. And then so it was like, how jeet up are you? And then so they were answering you, what would you wear to this and what would you wear to that? So I sort of wrote my own poem answering those questions. So it's called, how jeet up are you? The first part are the questions and then the second part of it are the answers to the questions. What would you put on to attend your daddy's sentencing? What would you put on if you went with your father to work filling a swamp of dirt for a real estate company developing a residential area called Magnolia Plantation? What would you wear to a party thrown under plastic palm trees around a shabby pool with no deep end at a motel called Oceanside? What would you wear to visit your big brother at the hospital after they moved him from the ER to the ICU? What would you wear in a house of mirrors? What would you wear in a house of God? What would you wear to visit your father in prison? What would you wear if you was in a music video? What would you put on if you was in a shoe store selling nothing but oxfords and penny loafers? What would you put on if you knew the news lady and her cameraman was coming to interview you about a crime you witnessed? What would you put on if your mama let you drive her car to visit your girl across town Saturday night? What would you wear if you drove half a day to see your girl downstate and when you got there it was way past the time where her parents said you could visit after they saw what you was wearing but you waited three, four hours until she snuck out the back door so you could walk with her up and down the neighborhood with dogs barking in the moonlight. I would wear the necklace my daddy gave me when he came home after a year locked away. I would put on Timboots to keep the mud from swallowing all the places I stood. I would roll my pants, legs up and wade in the water and gaze at the parts of me turned blue. I would wear blood on my shirt and blood on my fingers and leave some of what makes me breathe on the places I touched you. I'd wear a mask of silence and blind you. I'd wear a mask of myself and fit the same mask on you. I'd wear a year of sins around my neck and beg God to loosen the noose. I'd wear my father's disillusionment and fortitude. I'd put on a fitted cap so the shade over my eyes would move as I moved. I would never wear a white man's shoes. I'd put on sunglasses. I would wear a t-shirt that says I am the news. I would wear a tattoo of my daughter's name above my muscle. I would wear the moonlight like a tattoo. All right. So this is the last one. This is the last one. So that's not that much to say about it. Other than, yeah, my mom, actually my mother and my father, my stepdad are actually prison guards. So, you know, it's pretty true. Yeah, this was fairly accurate too, I guess, as far as things go in poems. So this is the only one I'll read that sort of riffs on the title. There's like three poems in the book. One of each of the three sections that has like something about how to be drawn. So this one's called How to be Drawn to Trouble. And thank y'all, you're a good audience. And then we gonna do Q and A, is that right? Or something? 1240. So, okay, so we'll see. All right, so this is the last one. How to be drawn to Trouble. The people I live with are troubled by the way I have been playing Please, Please, Please by James Brown and the Famous Flames All Evening. But they won't say. I've got a lot of my mother's music in me. James Brown is no longer a headwind of hot grease and squealing for ladies with leopard-skinned intentions, stoned on horns and money. Once I only knew his feel-good music. While my mother watched Convict's Dream, I was in my bedroom pretending to be his echo. I loved the way he says, Please, 10 times straight, bending one syllable until it sounds like three. Trouble is one of the ways we discover the complexities of the soul. Once my mother bit the wrist of a traffic cop, but was not locked away because like him, she was an officer of the state. She was a guard at the prison in which James Brown was briefly imprisoned. There had been broken man-made laws, a car-chase melee, a roadblock of troopers and sunblock. I for one don't trust the police because they go around looking to eradicate trouble. T-R-O, you better believe in trouble. Trouble is how we learn what the soul is. James Brown, that brother could spice up any sentence he uttered or was given. His accent made it sound like he was pleading whether he was speaking or singing. A woman can make a man sing. After another of my mother's disappearances, my father left her bags on the porch. My father believes a man should never dance in public. Under no circumstances should a grown man have hair long enough to braid. If I was a black girl, I'd always be mad. I might weep too and break, but think about the good things. My mother and I love James Brown in a cape and sweat like glitter that glows like little bits of gold. In the photo she took with him, he holds her wrist oddly, probably unintentionally covering her scar. There's the trouble of being misunderstood and the trouble of being soul brother, number one soul brother, God, father, dynamite. After that, the trouble of shouting, I got to get out. I got to get down. I got to get on up the road. For many years, there was a dancing competition between my mother and father, though rarely did they actually dance. They did not scuffle like drums or cymbals, but like something sluggish and close to earth. You know how things work when they don't work. I want to think about the good things. The day after the God, father or soul finished signing just that all over everything in the prison, all my mother wanted to talk about were his shoes. For some reason, he had six or seven pairs of Italian leather beneath his bunk, suggesting where he'd been, even if for the moment he wasn't going anywhere. Think about how little your feet would touch the ground if you were on your knees pleading two or three times a day. There are theories about freedom, and there is a song that says, none of us are free. My mother had gone out Saturday night and came home Sunday, an hour or so before church. She punched clean through the porch window when we wouldn't let her in. I can still hear all the love buried under all the noise she made, but sometimes I hear it wrong. It's not James Brown making trouble, it's trouble he's drawn to. Baby, you've done me wrong, took my love, and now you're gone. It's trouble he's asking to stay. My father might've said please when my mother was beating the door and then calling to me from the window. I might've heard her say please just before or just after the glass and then the skin along her wrist broke. Please, please, please, please, please. That's how James Brown says it. Please, please, please, please, please, honey, please don't go. All right, y'all.