WEBVTT

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And the last one comes
from what I was telling you

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I had learned about poetry
working on this book that

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learned that I could write sort
of on both ends of the spectrum

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or that I could try to.

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It's called "An Ocean of Code."

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And I was trying to write about
that sense which I had thought

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was a very personal sense
but which I'm learning

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more and more is a shared
sense among many people,

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that sense of despair or you
could call it depression also

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that sort of appears
and fades, appears

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and fades in waves in our life.

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And when you're in
one of those phases

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you might feel like you're
a failure because you

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can't engage with any
of the world around you.

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At least I did.

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I feel like those troughs
are kind of a failure.

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And then I sort
of thought, well,

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if I'm going to be
failing and troughing

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and diving and all this, maybe
I can at least say something

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about it.

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Maybe I can at least
make something of it.

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So this last one comes
from that effort.

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"An Ocean of Code."

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I want to disappear
like the glaciers.

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To hear the story I've
misnamed mine drip like time

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back into pebbly soil,
trying to decipher

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who wrote these
praises, who spoke

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with crows, who made this dent
in mystery solving for pattern.

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I break a spine with my
foreign sounding name on it

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find nothing but type and the
same head-haze The furthest out

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of the fog I can lumber today,
spit shining a smudge of food

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off my daughter my thumb rubbing
wet circles on her cheek.

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A bald eagle fledges from a bare
cottonwood on the elk refuge

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eyeing the coyote crunching
a yearling calf's carcass.

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And on the plains, a wave of
1,000 cranes ululate convoluted

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calls gaze from the Eocene
age to the dusky Platte muds.

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A better poet would
know what it means

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all of it clattering
song, the keel of it,

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the bloodied
scavenging teeth of it.

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I'm deaf on the floor
of an ocean of code.

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But still something
globes, bubbles,

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floats from my lips rising
to riddle the surface.

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Thank you very much.

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[APPLAUSE]

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