(papers rustling) (ambient street noise) (soft music) (people chattering) (ambient street noise) - If anybody wants to, there's front row seats right here.

So you're welcome to move if you so desire to come closer.

Come closer.

Come into this.

Come closer.

You're quite the beauty.

If no one has ever told you that before, know that right now.

You are quite the beauty.

There is joy in how your mouth dances with your teeth.

Your smile is simply a sign of how sacred your life actually is.

So step into it.

Come closer.

Know that whatever God might be they asked the world around them to help them make something of worth.

They woke from their dreaming, scraped soil from the spaces stuck somewhere inside themself made you, and were happy.

You make whatever that lord may be happy.

Come into this.

Come closer.

Know that something softer than us but just as holy planted pieces of itself into our feet that we might one day dance our way back.

Know that you are almost home.

Come just a little bit closer.

There are birds beating their wings beneath your breastplates, gentle sparrows aching to sing.

Come, aching hearts.

Come doormen of truth.

Gentle tigers.

Know that my heart was too big for my body, so I let it go.

And most days this world thins me, to where I'm just another cloud forgetting another flock of swans -- having shaved off so many of my corners that I have felt at home only in the shape of a ball, bending myself so far backwards that the song of my mother believed I was returning home.

I've been that poetry guy for a long time.

I went to school for visual art, specifically comic book illustration.

I really fell into painting and just like making art, but also writing poetry and particularly performing and speaking aloud poetry.

When I went off to school, having to kind of like arrive at a place of being comfortable calling myself an artist.

And so I had arrived at that and then all of a sudden, you know, somebody was saying like, "Oh, you're a poet."

And I know for me at that time, it was like such a kind of like strange thing.

I'd become like comfortable like, "All right, I'm an artist."

You know, suddenly like, "Wait, I'm a poet now?"

Like, "Is it a different thing?"

I am like you.

I am just like you.

I too at times am filled with so much fear, but like a hallway must find the strength to walk through it.

Walk through this with me.

Through this church of blood, bone, and muscle that is ours.

There is a doorknob that glows like chance before you.

Grab it, turn and pull, step through, back straight, chin up, eyes open, hearts loud.

Walk through this with me.

Walk through this with me.

Thank you.

(audience cheering and applauding) (record clicking) (upbeat music) ♪ Left out an ocean on top ♪ - I grew up in a household that was mixed - Black and Iranian, and like they were basically words to me, you know?

My mom is Black, my dad is Persian.

I grew up with a mom who co-owned and ran a children's bookshop.

Books were of great importance and remain great importance in our home.

I feel like most of the stuff in here, at least on the shelf, this is like things that are very much books and stories that I grew up with.

There's this book "Bloodline" that's got these short stories from the author, Ernest J. Gaines, who's a Southern writer, Black Southern writer.

And one of his stories, "The Sky is Gray," is one that like, I remember reading it in seventh or eighth grade.

And like the story still just like murders me.

It's just this like beautiful, heartbreaking story of a boy and his mom.

And it's one of those stories that it was just like a random photocopied handout from the teacher that for whatever reason really resonated with me.

And you know, I don't think I'd read it in 30-plus years and then came across this book and was like, "Oh my God!"

You know a big part of it I think of gathering these books is like having those experiences of just sort of like how they become these tangible objects that allow me to, you know, quite literally open up a door and like step into a time of which I once was, which I really love and appreciate.

(bird chattering) Poems are around us and are constantly inviting us to be an observation with them.

And I think that like the reason why those things are constantly asking us to be an observation with them is because ultimately that arrives us at being more an observation with ourselves and our humanity.

It's irrelevant whether you consider yourself a poet or not.

It's irrelevant whether you write poems.

It's irrelevant whether you read poems.

The poem is existing whether or not like I capture it or not.

- [Announcer] Stomp your feet, clap your hands.

It's Anis Mojgani.

(audience applauding) - Sometimes I would lay in the garden and pretend I was a carrot.

What has given me a greater sense of freedom to be able to like capture a poem is recognizing that the point and purpose of me writing a poem isn't necessarily to like specifically define something, describe something, and tell someone like, "This is what sadness is.

This is what joy is."

Always I am waiting for spring and for my love to return like it out of the cold and with flowers on their fingertips.

(audience applauding) (birds singing) For me, so much of it is just sort of like sitting.

Like the creative act, like so much of it is just like me sitting and doing literally nothing.

It feels like you're just kind of like tapping on a mountain and you're continuously tapping until you like hear the sound change.

And you're like, "All right, this is the place where the sound is different.

So now I got to tap just in this spot."

And keep tapping and tapping.

And at some point it'll break through.

And so I don't have to like walk quietly across the surface of the mountain anymore.

I don't have to sit patiently for the poem to arrive to me, to trust me enough to arrive in the room.

The poem is here in this room.

It arrived here yesterday.

I've sat long enough.

And now we can like do this thing together.

It's a lot of writing and moving things around and seeing what works and what happens and what like sounds right.

In the woo-woo way, that's how you capture a poem, by giving the space to it.

(gentle music) They have built hardwired clouds to keep us trapped under the heavy parts of our own selves To get out from under the small clouds in our large sky we will From under the small clouds in our large sky we will get out from we will have to get uncomfortable we will have to sacrifice we will but we are not losing anything in the sacrifice.

We are simply transferring energies to other energies matter transformed into another matter everything in the universe including our own wholeness is already here -- is already here -- physics assures us We come whole into this place all of us is already here.

The parts we want and long for or do not see or believe in, simply need to be transferred from one sleepy energy into a louder one We were young.

We grew old.

Both at the same time.

All at once we were together in the same place and same time.

All of us is already here.

I live and work in the Sunnyside neighborhood of Southeast Portland.

I love its walkability - walkability in that like I want to walk through it.

I get to live blocks from friends that I see every day.

Oh, I live five blocks from my studio.

My bookshop and my coffee shops are also walkable and it's an eight-minute walk to my library.

I love that I get to live in a village.

(sound of children playing) The windows to me in this room are so funny because it's like not like a cool studio room.

So it's not like this room is anything like special, but it does have this like big window that really gets really lovely light in.

And it's just like a funny window because it like slides open and it's like nothing special about the window either.

Like it just feels like kind of like a weird sandwich window.

You know, like, "What do you want on your sandwich?"

So, my friend Jen was coming by and we were going to go do something.

And she knocked on the window and I slid it open, but we started just like talking through the window.

It felt very neighborhoody.

It felt very Sesame Street-like, and we just hung out through the window.

We were both like, "Oh, this is so much fun.

We should do this more.

We should do this with more people.

What if there was poems happening out of the window?"

So I made up a flyer for like two nights later and posted up on Instagram and invited folks to come just sit and listen to poems.

And that first time, maybe 50, 60 folks showed up and brought chairs and plunked down in the street and I read poems to folks and my friend Joy played some songs at the beginning and it was really sweet and it was really lovely.

So we're like, "Yeah, let's totally do this again."

I want to experience something for myself just as much as I want an audience of listeners to experience something.

And so the best way for that to happen is to like approach the sharing of the poem out loud.

I get to like remember again why this sentence was here and what it is speaking to and to feel that.

You know where we are?

(audience laughing) No.

You?

No.

Every poem, I think, is asking to be said aloud.

May we be fenceless may we not hold our own selves inside grass grown squares guarded from the limbs of others May our places of peace be wild and overgrown Be fenceless your backyard forever be giving Have a good night.

(audience cheering and applauding) - [Audience Member] Thank you!

(soft music)