I'll start out by reading some poems I've been requested
to read if I can find them.
Yeah, I got a request to read a complicated poem that's
really not designed to be read aloud to an audience.
So I thought that I would read it first
and if it puts you to sleep a little bit.
Please be assured that I'll try to be more lively afterwards
because it is rather complicated.
That's called "The Branches of Water or Desire."
And it goes like this.
I repeat, I'm only reading it because I
was requested to do so.
Ordinarily, I wouldn't be afflicted on an audience.
"The Branches of Water or Desire."
"Imagine that the fast life of a bird
sang in the branches of the cold cast
off antlers of a stag and lips the points of bone with noises
like St Elmo's Fire.
Worn, those antlers were an outer counterweight
extravagant in air and poised against a branching need
inside drumming in the red inside the arteries
or antlers of the heart.
This was the balance that allowed the stag's head limber
to rise and might have been the gift the temporary reed boned
birds sang air about abundance rank beyond the knees.
The horns appear before the eye to be more permanent than songs
that branch out lightly on the air or root into the chest
and sing negative the breath that touches
at the branching veins at depth.
But when the leaping rat slept growing
in the hollow of behind the candelabra
that the head dazzled the wedding with
gathered to rubbish and were cast.
That perch for cold and birdsong was a call itself
and fell to grace the wilds correctly
since an itch under the root holds
of the horns whitens with mushroom
wants in cellars of the antlers nerves just off the brain
and wants to make its many points again.
Once cast, they are the dead and fall
duly as a sound falls in the cool of smoking days
when air sags with the damp and slung swirls in the hollows.
This is so the work can start again untrammeled
by the done, downed wonders and the upstart news to publicize
the crocus of next spring.
The stag has something on his mind behind his wand
and it is more than curious the way
the horns are worn at ease by cranial fulcrum.
Since the like of them, the light or songs or battle cries
or birds hummed in the chambers of the nose just off the brain
so that the chamber is mute, the brain
silenced and wants and plans vibrates and closest sympathies
with what is not its own and plays as best it can.
Those, the antlers, were the works the prides
and hat trees of the heads that climbed out of the brain
to show its matter, Earth and how
a beast who wears a potted plant all forms is mostly desert
plus a glory unsustained.
Or it is useless in a fight won by the head and heels
not nicety, not war cries worn in silence
to be seen behind cropping the perimeter of war
sooner accept the runner one homeless who has not founded
his desire with public works.
So call and be gone bird, the one who wears bow horns
and bear the singer too mindlessly
singing all the bird brained airs of spring,
but has to cast those tuning forks that let the icy song
and wither with this loss.
The bone as singing post is capital enough
in arms to hold the nation of your sound in singing's fief.
The brain's savage receptionist the ear
beating a drum outside its closest door
joins with the civilized electrical distance
from the brain in witnessing the poles of prongs and sound
walking across their earthworks of desire.
The sound and times must be some excess of the flesh that wants
the iron deficiency in time, but cannot find much prominence
outside of getting or not aside.
It must branch out in works that cap itself
for some imaginary reason out of mind."
As I said, the poem is entirely too complicated to be read,
but I was requested to do so.
So I did.