WEBVTT

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All right, this next one is
also a little bit about death.

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We always lie in bed and wake
up at 3:00 in the morning,

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and then we're like,
pondering the mysteries

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of life and death.

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And I've been reading
a lot of Diane di Prima

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and she came to New
York for the first time

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in 10 years, this past fall.

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And I've been
spending a lot of time

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with her, working with her,
and so this poem sort of

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came out of that and out of
our late-night conversations.

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And it ends in a quote by
di Prima, so expect it.

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Death is all.

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I woke up real early to
write about death, the lake

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through the trees from
the angle of the angel.

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There's a kind of
angel that when I say,

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someone please push me out
of the way of this bad poem

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like it was a bus.

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Well, it comes running
and tackles me,

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and Oh, it's divine football.

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Or in the dream when
the transparent buses

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came barreling towards
us, it was there.

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Half of all Americans say
they believe in angels,

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and why shouldn't they?

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If someone swoops
in to tell them

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how death is a fuzzy
start, it's full of bugles,

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well it's a hell of a lot
better than what they see on TV.

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The surf much too
warm for December,

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and roller coasters, full of
the wounded and the subconscious

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that keep pulling in, who
wants to believe death's

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just another life inside a box?

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Tale pale or more vivid, not me.

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Like in Gladiator, when
they showed the cypresses

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flanking the end road,
Oh, such your sandal,

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your tandem bike into
the land of shadows.

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Of course, I cried.

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Show me a cypress
and I'll just go off,

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but I don't want that to be
it or some kind of poem you

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can never find your way out of.

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And sometimes I think I
nod at the true death.

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One from a moving train, I see
a house in the morning sun,

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and it casts a shadow on
the ground, an inquiry.

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And I think crisp inquiry and
go on to work perfumed of it.

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That's the kind of
death I'm talking about,

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an angle of light.

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Believe in it.

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I believe in the
light and disorder

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of the word repeated
until quote,

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"meaning" unquote
leaches out of it.

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And that's what I wanted to
do with Dame death for you--

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repeated until you're
all what d-e-a-t-h.

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Because Amy, that's all it is,
a word, material in the way

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the lake through the
trees is material.

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That is, in so far, not at
all because we haven't yet

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swam in it.

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See what I mean?

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I see death.

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I smell death.

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It moves the hair
on my face but I

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don't know where it blows from.

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And in its source is my power.

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I'm incredibly powerful
in my ignorance.

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I'm incredible like
some kind of fuzzy star.

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The nonsense of me is
the nonsense of death.

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And Oh, look, lights through
the trees on the lake.

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The lake has the kind of
calmness, my pupil's surface

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beliefs.

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And this is just the
thing that the box

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land of shades at the end of
the remote doesn't program for.

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The lake is so kind to me, Amy.

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And I'll be so kind to you,
Amy, and so we'll never die.

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There'll be plenty of us around
to keep casting our inquiry

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against the crisp light.

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Light is all like, what's
up, I'm here, I'm an angel.

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And we're all, no, you're not.

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That doesn't exist.

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We all laugh and
laugh, or cry and cry.

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The point is it's
words, and so is death.

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Even in that silence, there's
bird calls, or meteors,

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or something hurtling through
space, there's matter in light.

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I've seen it through
the theater of the trees

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and it was beautiful.

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It cut my eyes and
I didn't even care.

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I already had to see
the scene taken care of.

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Even in the months, I didn't
have a single poem in me,

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I had this death, and this
love, and how's that not enough?

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I even have a quote, " Love
is the Angel Which Leads us

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into the Shadow," di Prima.

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