We could start a Save the Rattlesnake Association.
[LAUGHTER]
For my last poem tonight I'd like to read--
well, many of you are students and I
know you don't live in first class apartments
and I was like you too.
I still don't live in a first class apartment.
And we had a lot of cockroaches.
[APPLAUSE]
This one is called "Roaches".
[LAUGHTER]
No, no, you're thinking too hard.
[LAUGHTER]
Last night when I got up to let the dog out,
I spied a cockroach in the bathroom
crouched flat on the cool porcelain.
Delicate antennae probing the toothpaste cap
and feasting himself on a gob of it in the bowl.
I killed him with one unprofessional blow,
scattering arms and legs and half his body in the sink.
I would have no truck with roaches, crouching like lions
in the ledges of sewers.
Their black eyes in the darkness alert for tasty slime,
breeding quickly and without design.
Laboring up drain pipes through filth to the light.
I read once they are among the most antediluvian of creatures,
surviving everything, and in more primitive times thrive
to the size of your hand.
Yet when sinking asleep or craning at the stars,
I can feel their light feet probing in my veins,
their whiskers nibbling the insides
of my toes, and neck arched feel their patients
scrambling up the dark tubes of my throat.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]