So I’m the white teacher reading
some Etheridge Knight poems to the four
residents who showed: For Black Poets
Who Think of Suicide—thinking 
these guys have seen it all and want
something hard-core, when a black man
named Tyrone raises his hand:
These poems offend me.
They do? I say. Yes, I was raised 
not to curse, and I don’t see why 
a poem has to use those words. 


What poems do you like?  
Langston Hughes. 
Yeah, someone else says, Jean Toomer, man.
Tyrone says, Let’s talk about calculating a poem.
Pardon me, I say—
You know, cipherin a poem—
Why don’t you show me?  
Tyrone draws this two dimensional
image of this three dimensional grid, based
on numerology, he says, in which each letter
of the alphabet corresponds to a number.


Look, it’s like you start 
with a 13,25, then go to 8,5,1,18,20—
that’s the start of my first line:
‘My heart opens to the new world’—See?
I am stunned by it all—strange genius
or just strange? How long
have you been writing this way?
All my life, but nobody understands it,
I got boxes in my room filled with calculations,
I got plays and soap operas, and one day
I’ll sell them.


I’m looking into Tyrone’s eyes, beautiful
savant, wondering what to say: 
I’m standing here in my new Levis and 
Chuck Taylors, knowing I don’t understand 
either, and his desire humbles me.
Class is ending so I ask him to bring
more next week, but he has to see
his caseworker about his bad leg,
jammed up in a streetbeating in Philly.

							
Now I’m walking out of the shelter, 
my white skin reminding me how wrong				
I am most days, thinking about his sweet 
numbers, his poems luminous with industry.
I’m opening the door to my car, counting
vowels: 13,25,8,5,1,18,20, my heart
stirring in the new world.  

Listen to a reading of the poem.