WEBVTT

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The next poem is
called "The Aliens."

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And it's about the people who
come to visit you late at night

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with troubles on their mind.

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And it has a
epigraph from Rilke,

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which is almost as long
as the poem actually.

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But Rilke always seems to come.

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When it comes to
problems between people,

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he always seems to come right
there and say what's necessary.

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And this comes from his
fictional autobiography

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called The Notebooks
of Malte Laurids

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Brigge, which is a lovely book.

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The poem is called "The Aliens".

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I could simply write the
history of my neighbors.

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To be sure, it would
really be the case history

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of the symptoms
they caused in me.

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But this they have in common
with all such creatures.

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They can only be inferred
from the disturbances

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they create in certain tissues.

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These are real people.

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Shy as mice they tap
and never go away.

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They enter our houses
and private lives.

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Our heart should receive them,
we tell ourselves like blood.

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They lunge at us, smiles
like wrinkled fruit.

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Whole bodies quiver in
terror of greetings.

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Their souls crawl out.

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One tells a story of
wet tears in a paper bag

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who would cry all night.

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And one has a desire for
motherhood, a dark pillow

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releasing its feathers.

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They dis-attach like embryos
of how they could have lived

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had the world been right.

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Light rests on our shoulders.

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Often it seems we
want to fall asleep.

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They are our bad dreams, the
jinns of our crippled children.

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If we love them, we cry
out with a real longing

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for these are the creatures
our dying parents dreamed of.

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Wide eyed and naked,
serious as opera,

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they beg for a small
piece of our lives,

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what we might have been.