really thank you very much for coming i consider this a huge poetry reading any more than two people for a reading is big and i do appreciate having the opportunity to share this work which is sort of where my heart began as they say in the beginning of this book thirty years ago i was a teacher i you might say i was an emotionally disturbed teacher for very troubled kids and my job was to try and keep them awake and alert during the day now thirty thirty five years they do they're still keeping me awake nights the classroom is now in my head of they're still falling off their chairs to be heard and this book is an attempt at telling their stories all that on one thing or let go bulbous ballerina but mostly poly held the ball between his palms against his chest the way a preacher holds a bible to make god's point just like his mother's little christ is strengthened his grip on things extended his palms around the world he was barely able to hold on to no tongue in cheek pierre's on the run from haiti he had to leave in a hurry when the soldiers came to cut his mother's tongue out he says they took her tom because she talked too much but here could never get enough even when she scolded him it was kisses some nights he dreams about his mother's tongue flies it around like a magic carpet but many people were afraid of them one of the things that i used to do in far rockaway is take these in really the forgotten ghetto of new york city you might remember jack it's the only double stop on the new york city subway we have to pay twice get off and go all the way out to rockaway and out there with my forgotten kids and many poor people they also stored the older people  the cities store them where people older people who didn't have any place to go they put them in these homes out in forgotten far rockaway and well this is called the heroes and  the state home for the aging is a forgotten island of loss just down the block and around the corner from our schoolhouse it's ring didn't buy a twelve foot high bop wire fence meant to keep out the junkies who use flashlights to search for their veins after sunset on one side of the home is a hospital and across the street a torch out funeral parlor the sun never comes to the recipients excuse me the sun never comes to the residence of the old age home except as reflected through the eyes of my kids this is called paulie and say to play matter how many days of the week he gets cough tool wall in juvenile hall these poems by the way are written in two forms some are reflections teacher watching what's going on and some are the obvious sort of stories told sort of transformed into the poem this is called the way it is some days i can hold back their hunger with a recipe for sweet potato pie or divert it with a story about the biggest lie ever told sometimes i can snip the fuse from the dynamite and close the charge before it explodes i can rescue them from the murder scene with songs or poetry or an urgent session on the trampoline other days death comes its hair with the bones of my children daydreaming behind the projects well the black bitch cat scratches what's left of the rat's brain clean from the great half moon of its skull a few feet away joe joe plays with a red pickup truck is mind is driving to a country called california where his mother serves french fries to read and white faced surfers the cat finishes up lunch pressing him into stillness to avoid drawing blood jo jo was thinking about his tenth birthday he is studying his ten fingers thinking of each one as a here he can taste the he wants some of those french fries his mother is serving he's thinking maybe of heading out west to do some surfing himself and kick back for some tasty eats with mom innocent with guilty hands karen says her hands have a mind of their own they come and go as they please they take long walks and break off violently in her dreams they pinch and slap and steal and scheme they crave the feel of matches against gasoline well here's two poems about gloria gloria i had some of these kids i was lucky enough to have some of these kids over a two year period maybe fifth sixth seventh graders were they couldn't control they threw into my classroom and gloria didn't speak for the first year and a half but in maryland for both of them this is called silent partner our classroom is the only one with curtains it's gloria in maryland piece them together and sewed up their own friendship at the same time it was the first day of school marilyn flooded around in two languages gloria never uttered a word she just listened with her entire body together they cut and stitched ensued all morning with the strong thread of first beginnings in the beginning of the second here i found out why gloria didn't speak she spoke at home but she never spoke in school this is called chocolates not enough spilling over with songs her mom was saying as she fell asleep and flew across the sky under trappings of high notes hope ok said god you drive a hard bargain here's my final offer while set your softening grande her eyes glistening like the do on the early morning grass in front of the farmhouse in guatemala after her mama was snatched up by the soldiers for not telling them about the friendly men who  living in the barn and helping plow and see the fields felony bounce and bobo was busted for breaking in and turn he broke into school through a back door in the boy's gym they caught him bouncing barefooted on the trampoline just bobo eyes closed reaching for new heights gravity less cops cornered terence and tossed him against the fence he cursed their mothers when they cuffed him to the swings that i ain't done shit he insisted i just pushed the sucker over it was gravity that broke his neck one of the most difficult students that i had was a child i called regina in this collection and i learned that regina lived with her grandmother in the way they survived essentially was that she sold nickel bags of pot before school at the junior high school so here are two poems about  jane this first one is called accomplice regina sells nickel bath she does a brisk business before class she stashes the cash in secret pockets stitched to the insides of from pants if she comes to class poetry is her calling if i call the cops she'll be scribbling her poems on prison walls when the kids had an assembly the grandmothers and the mothers and who was ever around this showed up not only did they show up in numbers they got dressed up it was like the opera the come in here the kids perform so this was one of those performances it's called stage presence it's five minutes before show time and regina is emma i search the hallways and the stairwells i find her in the girls gym right behind the order tori i'm she is alone face in the corner the smell of reefer is in the air she is rehearsing the poem she is about to recite a retreat and leave it to fate now both cameras zoom in as regina rives on sept seconds before showtime exuding the confidence of a seasoned performer she takes your place center stage the curtain lifts to applause regina stands tall in the spotlight back straight head held high she begins to recite langston hughes altering the words to suit her gender i too sing america i am the doctor sister they send me to eat in the kitchen when company comes but i laugh and eat well and grow strong regina evaporates and to stage light and glitter one strong voice rises all eyes upon her she becomes the poet and boldly speaks the truth of the pomus her own she is greeted by waves of applause that break the silence and shake the stage where regina stands glowing like a georgia s the more the whiskey makes the rounds the riskier the game gets his father hasn't made a hand since the dealer broke the deck but now he's dealt a flush in spades bobo feels the winners rush he's ready for a celebration but the old man doesn't see the hand is too damn drug to see who wants to call the wind and haul him the cash but does he dare he knows about the pistol tucked in tito's sock about the switchblade six pack keeps up his sleeve for some quick magic bobo knows there are no sidekicks or i winks and no junior partner when it comes to high stakes poker at stickies club behind the projects on a sweltering friday night and i guess amongst the most difficult students was richard who was very troubled very poor very hungry and very hard to teach but his i found out that his father was a jazz musician and while here's a few about  the context of one boy band richard hates math but he's a master of mouth noise he can click and clack and pop and whistle he's mastered pitch an attack with the skill of a seasoned jazz man he's a one boy band plays a dozen different instruments between his lips and his hands late night he slips deeply from pops vinyl coltrane mingus lady day and miles his father chants these names as he falls asleep blue notes mingling with thunder and sirens and this is called where the music begins richard hates math but he counts on keeping time today he found a stethoscope behind the hospital and brought it to school for show and tell he put it up to his ears and against his chest began to snap his fingers to the beat of his own heart this he told us is where the music when touch breaks a branch torch and excuse me when touch breaks a branch touches high voltage for tanya today she right where she stood one pablo put his arm around her she twitched and tilted her head until her ear was touching her shoulder blade her neck was so bent out of shape it looked like a broken branch his he's too tough so two more lines of her acceptance speech as the new queen of may and well two more a lot it's really hard to teach hungry kids so i did a lot of teaching by feeding you know you know what let me just end with this po one of the one of the saving graces of teaching in far rockaway which by the way is a neighborhood that my when my grandparents were alive they would go out from manhattan to vacation for rockaway i remember as a young very little boy running through the beautiful clothes aisles of the shots out to the ocean by the time my kids got there it was you know they look out the window there w so many fires and they'd ask each other who is there it was there whose house it was you know that was up in flames but the saving grace of teaching in far rockaway that there was the atlantic ocean far rockaway if you have ever flown into know do you i don't maybe it's because it's so far out i mean it's really a long ride as i said a double from the subway but i'm not really sure about it it was sociologically quite an amazing space you start at the bottom of the sort of the queens there it was an old jewish neighborhood it was even when i was there when i would go shopping in the far rockaway shopping center sometimes the old jewish ladies who were too poor to move out of the neighborhood once it became very poor oh they would ask me for rides you know they would be standing out there with a bundle of groceries i give the right you follow it up a little bit it's all black high rise housing projects up another twenty blocks it's all irish poor irish you go over hundred twenty fifth street it's very it's very wealthy talents and jews and then all the way up it used to be a restricted neighborhood i can't remember breezy point and they used to have a gate to keep people out and it was totally white racist a very incredible strip of land with lots of people anyway there was the ocean and whenever i could i took my kids out on the beach and there are many lessons you can teach on the beach with shells and oceans and one of the things i used to do with my kids was about the how beautiful things can be huge like oceans or they could be in the tiniest perfect shell so we used to have search contests you know and they go looking around the beach for the tiniest perfect shell and we can there's so many lessons to come out of that but one would run up and they'd have a shell this big and it would be perfectly say look look at this show it's perfect then the next kid would run up and smaller perfect shell and until we had this time perfect beautiful shell and we understood the difference between the big beauty of the ocean and the tiny beauty of the tiny shell and the way this promise very little to do with that it's called and it's short it's called the great escape tony boyce searches the sand for a sea worthy shell he's poised to shrink down and sell to some on known po with the streets are not so hot and the money grows on trees and thank you very much f and you ask me what was the the critics the oh there were considered severely emotionally disturbed and i was so or you could say i was a profoundly emotionally disturbed teacher with rightfully troubled kids but they called them emotionally disturbed and now it was a it was a beautiful moment that i had a chance to be in a program that actually worked i only had ten kids can you imagine in new york city and it and i had an assistant and ten kids and we met with you know a psychologist and usually kids don't and poor kids don't get this it was a rare  in the history of the school system and i lucked out and so i had a chance to actually have an impact on these kids but they were called emotionally disturbed the the question was what was the diagnosis of the kids and so i'm sort of thinking they i don't really think honestly i don't think there was any really professional understand the kids there were so many different things going on with these kids and poverty was at the core they were fit they were fifth seventh grade it was sort of like it was it was a middle school but it was because of overcrowding it had usually the milk schools were six seven eight in the city but this one had five  some terrible things and i don't know of a lot of good things that happened to them but i'll tell you two stories paulie who was born brilliant you know with each one of these kids just  some born with a vocabulary and he would get into intellectual discussions sometimes he was so upset he would come to the class he'd stand outside my window and he'd listen through the open windows on the first floor but he would say mr b issue with you on a number of the points that you just made i really do know and it was it was just born in brilliant gifted very troubled his mom was very troubled he ended up organizing a stake stealing a ring he was doing pretty well he got busted and he got sent to you know one of these tough what they call a juvie hall and then to some kind of special school in the end the pain themself and i learn another student what happened to another student because i went i was teaching in prison as you know jack knows teaching in rikers island prison and in one of those classes one of my students from elementary school and then up in my prison class and i used to really force my kids my young kids to memorize lots of poetry even if they couldn't read it and made them right and they loved and hated me for it but in this instance i'm teaching it's my first day with my new prison class at john j probably used it quite a bit since he got out of my class but he remembered who taught  him questions thank you for coming really appreciate it that's a really good question and it's essentially i fell into it i always loved pacifica radio i always love community radio and at very young age i started to listening started listening to w b a i in new york and everest from the first moment i heard it at seventeen i was trying to figure out ways to talk them into putting me on the air so i would sort of show up at the station every a i in new york every six months or a year and say you know i've got a great idea for this show or that show or the other show nobody would listen to me i would go home and later though i ended up starting a poetry series in brooklyn based on the work of my teacher muriel rakhine is or a very fine poet who at the time was the president of the international writers association and and because i named the poetry series the muriel rakhine as a reading series every wonderful poet came out of the woodwork and wanted to be a part of it i ended up being a twenty four year old with the best poetry series in new york city and w p a i called and said could you bring that poetry series on the air and so muriel was very political i came to politics through poetry through radical writers i was a teacher and a radical i wasn't yet a writer and i began to teach and teaching i began to learn about two things i learned about how poor some of the communities were in new york city and also i learned that a number of the kids that were coming into the new york city system and were foreign language students were forced out of their countries in the western hemisphere by u s foreign policy and i understood pretty quickly that the u s southern pariah border was a direct barometer to the intensity of the u s funded wars down south and so i began to meet these refugees from our policy in central america from haiti in my classes and before i ever wrote poetry about them i learned their stories and out of that experience i later got thrown into journalism just by accident because i was in tucson working for the sanctuary movement and they needed a reporter pacifica need a reporter to report from tucson on this one thousand nine hundred eighty six sanctuary trial in which nine nine church workers and nuns and priests were indicted for working with the sanctuary movement which was helping the survivors those who  fleeing u s death squad policy in central america and were ending up in tucson and that's where i began to report that's how i got into journalism through the sanctuary movement i first did a show in new york city starting in one nine hundred eighty six because in tucson i discovered the name might sound familiar to oliver north because when i was investigating the tucson sanctuary trial i ended up in a bar with a guy by the name of james rayburn who was the chief investigator for the ins the one who busted all the sanctuary workers and put them on trial for felony charges and breaches and priests and we ended up being a bar in a bar one night and i said well god this is an incredible child how did this all start and he said well i was called into this office by the director of the ins at that time and he told me that it was important that we stop this flow of a dangerous refugees coming over the southern  border and i said really you will call to washington he says and the craziest thing is there this is lieutenant colonel who came into the meeting and i was it being interviewed by the head of my own ass have you ever done that for no and this crazy colonel said we've got to stop this we've got to stop this and i said what's that colonel's name and he said north north they said really north north what oliver north and that's how we found out that there was a secret operation going on in the basement of the white house yes this was one nine hundred eighty six then came the shoot down of eugene haas and for us and they found out that the plane the haas and for us was using actually was used by drug traffickers it was a trafficking plan that they had seized and then we learn and this is where my investigation really took off that the the u central intelligence agency working with oliver north was in fact in bed with the drug cartels of colombia and that the u s government and all over north had a made a  arrangement we called in a marriage of convenience in which the cia used drug traffickers to transport illegal weapons to support the contras who were trying to overthrow the  nicaraguan government and for doing those bring those weapons down in their empty drug planes they were given intelligence and allowed to bring their drug shipments back into the united states and we later learned after years and being called conspiracy kooks and crazy people that we were right in fact the cia inspector general did an investigation this was a part of gary webb's investigation of the san jose mercury news and finally years and years later the cia inspector general reported yes that the state department had hired close to two dozen traffickers and given them contracts with the state department to ship so called non lethal aid to the contr another words members of the cartels were put on the state department payroll and later we still learned that there was what was called a presidential finding signed by ronald reagan's first first attorney general william french smith and that finding that amazing document said that u s federal agents would be allowed to work with traffickers essentially terrorists and they would not have to report their illegal activities if in fact it would but they didn't have to report it any cop just turns their back they learn about a drug shipment and they don't report it they might face twenty years the most highly decorated d e agent ever one of the founding members a guy by the name the michael levine said back at the time if i found a notebook like i had like we found of all of a north with dozens of drug references and drug planes and operations with drug dealers this michael levine said i would track that guy from sunrise to sunset until i put him in jail but that was a lieutenant colonel named alfred north i think i got the story right it's been a long time since i've told well i had discovered at the time it was a very troubling time our board had been taken  over by a group of people who didn't understand pacifica didn't understand community radio mary frances berry was made the chairman of the board and she was at the time the chairman chairperson of the u s civil rights board and she really had something else in mind and so she had this new board that she concocted she had one of them who was say at one of the largest real estate agencies in the country and used in texas she had him begin to investigate what our stations were worth and w b i in new york and cape p f a in san francisco were two of the early community radio stations can you imagine in new york ai is ninety nine point five f am right in the middle of the commercial dial p f a in san francisco is at ninety four point one you know most of the not commercial radio stations are down ninety or below but here we were in the middle of the dial ninety nine point five in new york city the radio station was worth several hundred million dollars the transmitter with top of the empire state building it has access to thirty five million people this little community radio station we had air we had clear channel measuring our signal in san francisco because we have a state the strongest signal in the f m band stronger than k q e d which is the largest public radio station in the country so these stations were worth a ton of money they estimated between five hundred million dollars and a billion dollars once they started turning them around because of the the new rate the new technology and the use of these fat bands and all this kind of stuff so i happened to intercept and get a hold of a memo that showed that this real estate guy from houston was getting bid sensually was testing and finding out exploring how much money our radio stations would be worth and who might be interested in buying them i got a hold of that i went on the air they were already at the station had already been seized by ten on guards five of five at a time they would stand around in front of my studio their rifles they had weapons they were they were they took over the station when they took the station on a saturday morning they came into the station they said where are my we're locking down the station the person doing the music program at seven thirty in the morning was a little bit surprised about that so they had taken the station locked down i used to purposely go in there and sit between these five on then who would sit in front of my studio and open up my man and you know we were having serious encounters but then i got the e mail i want on the radio i knew it was going to be trouble i already had handcuffs up in my office and i went on the air i broke the story about my show is from five to six i broke it at about five fifty right before the news comes on at six o'clock then i left the station i was on my way upstairs to go to the newsroom because we had a big news story here and i was being pursued i was met by the inter manager they brought in from euston he told me leave the station now i said well i left my keys upstairs he said we'll bring you your keys i took off upstairs five of these armed guard thugs followed me into a law i have radio studio the new studio which is upstairs and the new show i just be i knew this at six o'clock so these guys followed me into a live radio studio show doing the news and the guy had to interrupt the broadcast and what people heard as the engineer put up the the sound was me screaming at these guys and don't you guys know where you are don't you know this is a pacifist radio station put your guns back in your host to do you don't know what's going what are you going to shoot me  and the whole community heard this encounter for about eighteen minutes and then it will make it wasn't even that long and then the acting manager shut us off from a different studio they went to  tape and they started they threw us all out they fired me and we had a multi month battle in court and in the streets where tens of thousands of people marched to support the radio station and it was a battle that i didn't ask for but that we were ready to take on and we ultimately saved it you know i after the  sound was shut down and they were playing tapes the the new acting manager a called the police to have me arrested as a trespasser in my own news room so there i was sort of sitting down to stand up for free speech rate i can't remember if i was locked down by that point but the chief of police butler butler yeats spent close to four hours saying please he really was sympathetic and he's saying please leave will set you up we'll close down the street for in the station will set you up with a protest but you can't stay inside the owner is saying you gotta leave it with the people on this radio station so i spent hours trying to talk to the chief of police into sitting down with me an old civil rights activist and self but because to help block an armed robbery a major grand larceny of one of the most important institutions the people's institutions in the bay area so he should sit down and  what mary frances berry thought i think this is what i think this is my speculation now is that they were trying they wanted to get a lot of money create a pacifica foundation for media so you end up with control over two hundred million bucks right then they were going to buy maybe seventeen or twenty five small black radio stations throughout the south and it would be essentially a black radio network supporting the democratic it would be like a democratic party tool mary frances berry was a high level democrat close to clinton you know they really wanted to do something else and it didn't have to do with community radio percent where they were clueless of the concept and they didn't understand that fifteen thousand people would be in the streets to fight that battle i'm may have gotten some of the details wrong but you know i did a long exhaustive speak piece for project censored they every year they have a year book and in the censored year book i think it was nineteen in two thousand or two thousand and one i did i wrote the whole piece so if people want to check the history check the details see the copy of the intercepted memo about selling the stations about what they were worth that's all i made sure to document that i don't think was the greatest article but i got to know all the details well i think you have to really pay attention to a lot of different things like i think i recommend paying attention to some of the key alternative journals i really love the  progressive they do a good job at a certain level they do a lot of excellent human rights reporting i think the nation does some good work but there are so many wonderful blogs and i like common dreamless dot org because they have so much up there they hook in they have a beautiful website that can hook you into all the alternative websites the magazines a beautiful alternative magazine that i write for is consortium news dot com bob perry a master journalist at the he when he was at the top of his game he was a reporter for newsweek he had just a one the the very prestigious george polk award an a p i think it was i'm sorry the newsweek fired him because he was breaking too many stories that were getting them in trouble and they were losing their access so i really love consortium news dot com he's a wonderful journalist and they do beautiful stories there truthout is very good although they don't touch the situation around israel palestine some reason they're afraid of that one i honestly i can make some enemies saying this but i've always done that i have tremendous respect for people like rachel ma ed the edge show and some of these other shows but really they're all flacking for the democratic party it's all about the democrats are great and the republicans are horrible and  it feels to me that rachel maddow is trying to get a job as you know a science advisor or press person for the obama administration and so i don't depend on that she can do wonderful journalism but i'm so tired of her defending one side and going after the other i've got a lot of problems with obama so that's that's troubling too and you know i have a lot of respect for amy goodman she is a little light on the middle east and what else whatever you can get out there i love that there's a a web site this isn't real this isn't really happening are all gone i can't remember liking on it now but anyway there's a lot of stuff read a lot of different things the new york times  all the news that gives me fits you can get a lot of interesting material about certain stories but when it comes to foreign policy there norm of the state department remember judith miller the lead writer for the new york times and of going to jail by the way she works now for fox news but the lead writer for the new york times that road won one misleading or one totally unrepresented article after another and she lived us into a war because like so many as i should say journalists working today they act like stenographer has when it comes to state department policy and what the state department is repeating so you know you got to look around you've got to read a lot of different things and i love some of the bloggers it goes on that room where the tank well no they wouldn't be here today it was only by the grace of god that no one got killed my son is a power operator there and i think god that he didn't go to work that night because i know he would have been right in the smack dab middle of it however his his friend coworker was there the surveillance operator had just made with a tour and gotten out of there the power operator i talked to him and he told me he says you know says i don't know why but for some reason that night i changed my route of how i do my surveillance and he says in you know if i would have done it like i normally do it he says i would have been right there when it happened as it was he was right down at the bottom of the steps when it blew the repercussion sent him back that eight to ten feet just pulled him back he still has not regained hearing in one ear that if people don't even know about that deal we didn't even know problems getting time off to go down through h g h for his hearing to be checked i mean it's been a nightmare for him they sent him down but he had his physical and he had a whole body count and a chest count which showed him totally off the scales with emory c m ok so they individual that i know of physically through his hearing loss has really you know been the one that was really injured through you know he lost his hearing in one ear and he was the one that was right there in the building so yeah down the stairs yeah see you  half you go down the corridor there's a door and from that door you've got force flights the steps to go up to the top floor or the first floor you can enter into the first floor and then go up t fourth floor and that's where his tank was yeah exploded and so would he have been the only one in the building he was the only one that was in the building yes and like i say he went to the blast knocked him eight to ten feet back yeah he was right at the door he had the key in the door ready to open the door and go in when it blew in and knocked him door force of this explosion blew that right through the roof and it was actually piercing through the rough and then it seems like there was a couple of other little