NPR poetry Month: Vince Staples Reads His Favorite Twitter Poems（在线收听）

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Now it's time for more Twitter poetry. Here's one from Dave Paulsen in Minnesota.

DAVE PAULSEN: String cheese. You think you're so smart, shedding your skin like a cylindrical reptile. Take heed, though, little dairy product. Your changes are numbered.

MARTIN: Now we asked Dave if this poem came out of some kind of epic string cheese struggle, and he replied think of it as a statement about all of our struggles with hubris and an eventual vulnerability to change. All, of course, embodied within a tasty dairy snack. And there was a winky face emoji at the end. OK. Let's hear it again, this time through that filter of existential angst.

PAULSEN: String cheese. You think you're so smart, shedding your skin like a cylindrical reptile. Take heed, though, little dairy product. Your changes are numbered.

MARTIN: Thank you, Dave Paulsen. And it's not all fun and games and dairy products on our Twitter feed. There are a lot of thoughtful reflections on nature and identity which makes it a good time to turn it over to rapper Vince Staples. He came to our studios for an interview which you will hear later this hour. But while he was here, we asked him to check out #NPRpoetry and read a couple of his favorites.

VINCE STAPLES: My name is Vince Staples, and I'm going to read a couple of poems for tweet poems for poetry month. This is by Jack Mayer M.D. (ph). (Reading) I am a god to the birds.

Great work. This is by Frooz Bashar (ph) (reading) we're mammals with money, people, mammals with money.

That [expletive] is deep.

MARTIN: Yes. That stuff is deep, although mammals with money is not really a Twitter poem. It's actually a quote from our colleague Sabri Ben-Achour in a Marketplace report - poetic though.

If you have any poetic insights, remember all this month you can tweet your original poems to us with a hashtag #NPRpoetry. We might just reach out and ask you to read it on the air.