Do we even have time for one more poem?
Yeah.
Uno mas.
This is a poem that will soon be published,
and [INAUDIBLE] and I fear that both our parents will be pretty
pissed off--
[LAUGHTER]
OK.
[LAUGHTER]
--which, hopefully, means that I have succeeded.
[LAUGHTER]
OK.
"A Poem for You."
"I wanted to write a poem so full of spirit-lite TM
that my father would finally like it,
that would bring him easy peace.
I wanted to write a poem so wise,
yet tailored for one sitting, that even Mom would understand
and say, yes, in that way women agree with each other about how
their husbands are just so messy,
but they still love them.
They say it over and over, my husband.
I wanted to write something called Portrait
of the Immigrant as Your Little Pony,
about how all over America I travel
to sing my song that there is no song, about
my bombed body as the site of abandonment.
And I'd be the critical darling, and they'd say, she did it.
But nothing, no song came, not anti-song, just nothing.
I just sat there on the train next to the guy
watching Mad Money on his handheld.
By the time I got home, I was so tired.
I pet the dog.
I wanted to write a nice, long poem for all your straight
girls.
Your religion's rose and glass castles hold no place for me.
I'm out of my princess phase.
Your pink pony wants to fuck you.
She's limp with longing from being always touched
and hollow, comb-tugged right out of her field.
Oh, I'm too tired to worship at your kittenish emptiness.
For years, my emptiness echoed into yours, oh, Hai!
For years, I've been your pony, and I
wanted to fuck you without your pink dress, the glitter
and the organs, all colorless.
Is that so wrong?
I'm over it.
I can't even look at myself naked while I change out
of body into the poem.
I love someone now.
She's teaching a class.
She had a bad dream and threw the lotion at the hurtful door,
and I love her.
There's nothing hollow there.
There's no void in the straight girls either, not really.
This yard in you, ladies, green and moonlit,
where you prance like difficult adult Bambis--
that's not desperate, that's beauty.
I only wanted to have my fill, as I fill her.
Undo you first, then balance out the void in a weighted way,
so then you'll know.
How do you do a Barbie?
With meaning.
Women, I'll defend your beauty when no one else will.
When you're lacerated with IVs and wrinkles,
I'll say how I filled you with awe
When you're a crazy-eyed teen who hears voices and sings them
out at an American Idol audition,
a sparrow aping the star-song ringtone, I'll get it.
I love when you're not quite right.
Secretly, I'm a believer.
Dad, are you really a believer?
You told me my child might not inherit
the land if she comes out of the womb of the woman I love.
It's too late, though.
I imagined that land.
It already fills me up, white lichen and snow meadow.
I ate like stranded travelers eat their frozen companions--
first out of need, then I locked it in a deed via gaze.
And after all these centuries, Mom,
why do you still worship the boys?
That's why I can't write you a poem.
I can't write it for my friends either.
I don't see much of them.
I live where people live now, lifelike,
their ideas like crabapples.
I look at my yard like I'm a real sort of person.
I sit at a desk of someone.
I hear she wrote.
She trained for some epic war that
would always keep her cellared, always longing, bang!
That mirror was green and breezy,
and she longed the hell out of it.
You could say she's too full of readiness.
She trained for everything but this, bureaucracy
and happiness.
But I have to learn to write about just living
so close to the voids, to write in a speech
I wasn't born mouthing, about the ground I
wasn't born sniffing.
My face stuffed full of the land and the language of longing.
Hell yeah, I'll learn to write just like you.
Green stems are growing out of me.
I belong everywhere in you.
Hi, I'm you.
It's so filling when there's only one of us here."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]