I'll leave you with that thought for a second.
[LAUGHTER]
You can enjoy the shiver of apprehension
while I look for the next poem.
Few more phones poems.
Does everyone know who Mayakovsky is?
Mayakovsky was a Russian poet and actually wrote
during the Soviet times.
And so this poem is a little bit about--
you think about poets who write in countries that don't really
allow them to say certain things and how the stakes are much
higher, and so this poem is a little bit about what it means
to write poetry here where the stakes are allegedly not
very high but I'm not exactly sure that that's true.
About Mayakovsky, I'm older.
I'm waiting to care less, cheat on my kids with dead people.
I'll tell you straight up.
You don't get to talk about Mayakovsky.
Take that skateboard and go back to the suburbs
and talk about them.
They're luminous.
Big baby, I hope going forward there will be consequences.
I hope to thin into the era when female people like
me were given hooves and the strength
to pull the field over their stepson like a blanket
without kitsch and called witch and turn white stone in a fern
forest.
Not having been finished, I use the implements
of housework for miracles.
Grow the darning needle into a mast, rag into sale,
and having no husband or boy child
to save from the court of the sea king start in search
of pale from over mention recycled some blabla
and find her seaweed bush, hot cynic hair, blah, blah.
How can I protect her from her body,
from not writing about me, from my own lack of trust
in that trust bears apples?
By divorcing Mayakovsky.
Divorce sadness is a substitute for sex.
The way to forest male lard, marbleized tears banging
hard against my torso, that whole mystery of.
Sure you can talk about him, have him.
He's more you than he's me now.
I'm that wide herd of cows gliding like brides
to the small green island in the middle.
Sometimes I'm full of water like of spirit
even as my passenger's drowning.
And before Christmas, there was a day or two
when I was almost someone who even sometimes reads,
a person with interests even if fake.
In truth, dissing Mayakovsky, brother, as much as I do now,
it hurts me.
Sometimes I'm a stone half in, half out of water,
green above and fire beneath, but really what I'm trying here
is to care less so I'd care more like when
I was bride of Mayakovsky, like when
I loved the one who was the bride of Mayakovsky
like the time when to read and write
was an offense punishable by death
and taking it or leaving it was death.
And so we did.