WEBVTT

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These are the new poems.

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I'm going to read a few of
the new poems from this book.

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And title poem of the book,
"The God of Loneliness."

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I'm sure you'll remember
how hard it was to get a Wii

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Game when they first came out.

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And my boys-- I have two
sons-- wanted them very much.

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And I would go from
one place to another.

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And always be one or two
bodies short of the store

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closing or running
out, and coming home,

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and disappointing my kids.

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And so I finally was
determined and there

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was a Toys "R" Us where
I live in East Hampton,

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the tip of Long Island.

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And I was the first one on a
Sunday morning at 6 o'clock,

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and these other men came.

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And I knew there
was a poem in it

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but I was two years away from
understanding what it was

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or what it was about.

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This was the height
of the Iraq war too.

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"It's a cold Sunday,
February morning,

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and I'm one of eight men waiting
for the doors of Toys "R" US

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to open in a mall on the
Eastern tip of Long Island.

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We've come for the
Japanese electronic game

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that's so hard to find.

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Last week I waited three
hours for a store in Manhattan

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to disappoint me.

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The first today,
bundled in six layers

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I stood shivering in the dawn
light reading the New Aeneid

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translation, which I hid
when the others came.

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Stamping boots and
rubbing I recognized

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that I have to be one of them.

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Stamping boots and
rubbing glove-less hands,

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joking about sacrifice--

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joking about sacrifice-- OK.

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Which I hid when the others
came snapping boots and rubbing

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glove-less hands,
joking about sacrificing

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sleep for ungrateful sons.

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My boy broke two front
teeth playing hockey,

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a man wearing shorts laughed.

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This is his reward.

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My sons will leap into my
arms remembering this morning

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all their lives.

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The game is for my oldest
boy just back from Iraq,

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a man in overall says
from the back of the line.

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He'll play these games
in his room all day.

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I'm not worried.

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He'll snap out of it.

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He's earned his rest.

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These men fix leaks, lay
foundations for other men's

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dreams without complaint.

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They've been waiting in the
cold since Aeneas founded Rome

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on rivers of blood.

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Virgil understood that
death begins and never ends.

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That it's the God loneliness.

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Through the window a clerk
shouts we have only five.

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The other seem not to know
what to do with their hands,

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tuck them under
their arms or let

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them hang naked and useless.

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Is it because our hands
remember what they held,

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the promises they made.

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I know exactly when my boys
will be old enough for war,

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soon three of us will wait
across the street at Target,

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because it's what men
do for their sons."

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