WEBVTT

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And this is another poem with
blocks of verse and blocks

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of prose, but the prose
is mine, as is the verse.

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It's called "Reforming
the Crystal."

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"I'm trying to imagine how it
feels to you to want a woman.

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Trying to hallucinate
desire centered in a cock,

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focused like a burning glass.

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Desire without discrimination,
to want a woman like a fix.

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Desire, yes.

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The sudden knowledge,
like coming out of flu,

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that the body is sexual.

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Walking in the streets
with that knowledge.

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That evening in the
plane from Pittsburgh,

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fantasizing going to meet you.

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Walking through the airport
blazing with energy and joy.

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But knowing all along
that you were not

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the source of that
energy and joy.

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You were a man, a
stranger, a name,

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a voice on the
telephone, a friend.

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This desire was mine.

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This energy, my energy.

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It could be used a hundred
ways, and going to meet

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you could be one of them.

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Tonight is a different
kind of night.

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I sit in the car,
the engine racing,

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calculating the
thinness of the ice.

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In my head I am already
threading the beltways

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that rim this city, all the
old roads that used to wander

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the country having been lost.

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Tonight I understand my photo
on the license is not me,

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my name on the
marriage-contract was not mine.

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If I remind you of my father's
favorite daughter, look again.

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The woman I needed
to call my mother

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was silenced before I was born.

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Tonight if the battery charges
I want to take the car out

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on sheet-ice.

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I want to understand my
fear both of the machine

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and of the accidents of nature.

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My desire for you
is not trivial.

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I can compare it with the
greatest of those accidents.

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But the energy it draws on might
lead to racing a cold engine,

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cracking the frozen
spiderweb, parachuting

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into the field of a poem wired
with danger, or to a trip

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through gorges and canyons,
into the cratered night

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of female memory,
where delicately

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and with intense care the
chieftainess inscribes

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upon the ribs of the
volcano the name of the one

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she has chosen."

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