I’m headed towards the clouds, y’all. I’m headed towards the clouds. Got a pocket full of dreams, no one’s holding me down. I’m headed towards the clouds, y’all. I’m headed towards the clouds. Got a pocket full of dreams, no one’s holding me down. I’ve been looking at the sky wondering why we don’t know how to fly yet. Spread your wings. Your fingertips are feathers and your breath is the wind. So fly. Fly like the ground is on fire and the air is water. Like the sky is getting higher, but the world is getting smaller because you are more powerful than time. Time does not breathe, does not feel pain, does not feel love. Time really doesn’t exist unless you do. You control time. You control what you give it to and on what you decide to waste it on. I’ve spent 22 years of my life watching time take my mother’s sanity through a gambling addiction. I’ve spent 22 years of my life watching my father overwork himself. He is a zombie forever stuck in a graveyard shift. I’ve spent 22 years of my life watching time spin in circles. In circles I spin addicted to AM and PM. It doesn’t take days or years to change the world or reach your goals. It simply takes you. Don’t let time take you. You take time. I’m taking time talking about time and giving my time to you. My time is not precious. My time is not gold. My time is only valuable when I share it with you. You are my gears, spinning me in an everlasting rotation. You are my clockwork, everything’s. You are my sun sets and sun rises, showing me the time without even using numbers. Like your smile has two points. So I know it must be two o’clock. I wish it was two o’clock everywhere and every day. So even when the sun comes down, your smile will become the sun rays. I’m headed towards the clouds, y’all. I’m headed towards the clouds. I got a pocket full of dreams. No one’s holding me down. I know you’ve been searching for an answer to your pain. But pain does not have an answer. It’s more so a remedy called love. And this love is held hostage in a home you stop spending time with, called your heart. Love is an art only learned by the lessons of pain. Pain means you’re learning. Love means you’re teaching. Time is your servant. And giving is receiving. I give you my pain. I give you my time. I give you my love. And all I ask of you in return is to fly. And I’ll see you in the clouds someday. I’ll see you in the clouds. You got a pocket full of dreams, so don’t let me down. Thank you. I deserve the love your weak heart can’t hold for me. I deserve the fairy tale ending my mama always told to me. I deserve to be told every day that you adore me. But I couldn’t get that from you because you only wanted one thing from me, so you couldn’t love me properly. But I would no longer be subject to these hand-me-down feelings you have for me. I would no longer be that dirty secret you sneak in between your bedsheets to hide your insecurities. I would no longer be the girl you can’t let your friends see because I don’t fit the description of what they think your girl should be. Fuck what your friends think of me. Call me when you get a heart strong enough to hold all 250 pounds of me. Yeah, your love for me should not have a weight limit. I should have to be thin to fit in it. I shouldn’t have to be a certain size to ride this ride. You can say you love me over and over. You can say it till hell gets colder than the Arctic. Just know one thing. I’m not buying that shit. My love for you is gone. And from now on, only accept love in the form of actions because your words are invalid. I’m sick of being bent over backwards. So from now on, only accept love in the form of actions because your words don’t matter. I am tired of being bent over backwards. I had been bent so far back, I could see my past. And I realized you are just like my last. And he, like the one before him, this cycle has got to end. So starting today, I’m going to snap my back into place, wrap a metal rod up in my self-esteem, and put it where my spine should be because I’m the only one strong enough to keep me standing, don’t you see? I’m the only one with love strong enough for me. So does anyone here watch cartoons? Who likes watching cartoons? I know it’s where it’s getting at that age. Does anyone remember watching The Simpsons? The Simpsons, anyone? I loved watching The Simpsons. I loved watching cartoons all the time when I was little. The funny thing is, though, when I was growing up, when I was little, there was no one for me to self-identify with in American pop culture. I came to this country when I was about four, and I always just watched way too much TV. I named myself after Flash Gordon, when my parents asked me what I wanted to be called when I came to America. What we would call The Simpsons is we would call them Wong Yan. And if you know Cantonese, that directly translates to yellow people. So to me, on the screen, there was Dr. Nick from The Simpsons, the Asians from The Simpsons, and Yao Ming. Seeing as how I wasn’t a doctor, nor did I talk like a deice, nor was I a seven foot Tom NBA player, I never thought I was something that would ever get attention. In between the 4 AM infomercials, Saturday morning cartoons, and the OC, I never saw myself. I saw chopsticks, bad accents, and kung fu, but never just me. Whenever an Asian was on the screen, he was only on there because he was Oriental. Never because he was a human being who just happened to be Asian. As I grew older, I started noticing a little more missing. I went through years and years of world and American history, and there were only ever those two little sections. One about the railroads, and one about Pearl Harbor. And even then, the teacher would never focus too long on those sections, all the books I read now. All the books I learned from now treat Asian Americans like an invisible child better yet. They don’t treat us any particular way at all. They completely sidestep and ignore all of the real Asian American history I would love to learn about. Just this past semester, I took two sociology courses at East Los Angeles College. Every single statistic read Caucasian, Hispanic, African American, Caucasian, Hispanic, African American, Caucasian, Hispanic, African American, as if Asian Americans haven’t experienced enough to be relevant in these texts. I don’t want to have to take a course labeled Asian American Studies just to hear that I’m a part of this American society. I don’t want to have to be wearing my festive chong bao, cooking fried rice and beef and broccoli for you to see me as an Asian man in America. I want racists to stop holding the word chink in their mouths, just as much as other racists lose their even condition to whisper. I want the boiling pot in the soup of America to finally taste like the porridge my parents cooked for me when I’m sick with the flu. And being Asian to stop being a gimmick, to make me feel exotic, I want to feel human. I don’t want to be the black sheep at the dinner table, waiting to be served my culturally appropriate portion. I want to be given a fork and a spoon at the dinner table and flipping them around and using them as chopsticks anyways. I don’t want to be an invisible minority. Oh, yeah. Oh, I guess so. Great. No, wait. Gordon, Gordon. We’re going to talk just for a little bit. We’re going to talk just for a little bit. And so you guys might be wondering, wow, they’re so diverse. Where are they from? So the location we’re coming from today is from Los Angeles. We’re all from Los Angeles. Usually we get a lot of booze on that one. And then the organization we’re from is organization known as? Gitlit, Words Ignite. What’s that? Gitlit is an organization that goes into high schools and middle schools and teaches kids classic and original response poetry in order to get them interested in literature. And Gordon, what’s a classic poem? So a classic poem is not what you might regularly think. What a classic poem is, is anything from Shakespeare to Tupac to Kendrick Lamar we have this year, to Gwynethlin Brooks to EE Cummings. It’s all the classics and all the classics and all the classics. A classic is not something that’s old, it’s something that’s great. So what we think is we get any type of modern or a little more romantic poetry from the olden ages. And we get all of it and then learn through it. And then like Marquische said, we respond to that classical poetry. Yeah, it’s a 12-week based curriculum. And students are asked to pick a classic poem, memorize it. And then the feelings that arise from reading that classic poem, whether it reminds them of a memory, or makes them think about politics, or makes them think about whatever, that thought is then going to be put onto a page and called a response poem. And so at the end of the year, I believe it’s March 30th this year to April 1st, we’re going to have a thing called a classic slam. That’s where over 60 high schools in Los Angeles compete with each other with the classic and responses. And it’s really an amazing thing to watch, to be honest with you. Because then you see this kid from Compton reading, what women has anyone supposed to be lucky to be born. And to see that dynamic, and you would think kids only pick the two-pox and the Kendrick Lamar is no. Kids, you were always surprised every year by what poems kids pick. And because you have to think, if a poem talks about pain, pain is timeless. So anyone can relate to that. And so we all went through the curriculum. We’re all teachers and mentors now, and performers, and a very appreciative of the relationship we have with Get Lit and the relationship Get Lit has with the world. So that’s us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.