Let's see.
I'll read one more from this.
And then I'll read from my last one.
Maybe I'll read one more from it.
I don't know.
No, I'm going to go on.
The next one?
Yeah.
I hadn't read any of those poems in a while-- a long time.
That was fun.
Are you hearing me all right?
Mm-hmm.
OK, good.
As a writer, you often give yourself rules.
Or as a teacher, you're often giving your students
rules, right?
And so in workshop, I had told my students--
this one student had done this that he'd
written a poem about a moth.
And again, continuing the moth, the animal theme,
writing a poem about moths is hard, why?
Because what's it all going to be about?
A moth to the flame, about how their love is so tragic
and, you know, they're 21 years old and--
[LAUGHTER]
They've experienced everything that they're ever
going to experience.
And they've experienced serious misery and heartbreak,
and so on and so forth.
Anyway, this guy had brought in a poem
about the moth to the flame and how he had flown--
and I guess the flame was love.
[LAUGHTER]
Right?
Or it was-- I didn't really understand it, actually.
And I think maybe he was the moth and love was the flame.
Or it was his beloved.
And anyway, he'd flown too close to the flame
and he'd been burned.
And it was a sincere poem.
And I felt bad about it.
But it seemed like it's one of those things
that that's an image or a trope that's
really hard to rehabilitate.
And so I said, maybe you shouldn't do that.
And so I went home that night and I really felt really bad,
because any time I felt like I'd give myself a role
or I tell myself you shouldn't do something,
it's usually a good time to tell yourself you should probably
try to get away with it.
And so that night, I went home.
And there had been another student
who had mentioned her name in a poem.
And I said, that's really kind of obnoxious.
Don't mention your own name in a poem.
And so I thought, well, no.
I wasn't actually going to try to write a moth poem, actually.
I was still not going to go that far.
But I thought, like, I'm going to see
if I can get away with mentioning my name in a poem.
And it's this one.
It's on page 3.
It's also one sentence long.
And it's two pages.
All right, "My Life Among."
"I'm beginning to dream again of my life among the ornamental,
the vaguely functional, the doorsteps and paperweights,
my tenure in the legion of lawn gnomes,
my brotherhood with novelty decanters,
my solidarity with the general useless,
the inscrutably devised, the deformed idea,
the eldest clock, the flea market fantasm,
the broken stapler clicking toothlessly,
the pin caddy unpinned.
I'm driving towards nowhere and listening to the station
broadcasting the weather and forgetting the weather.
I'm shutting my vinyl coat in the car door.
I'm leaving it there in the door like a strange maroon pelt.
I'm dreaming of all the use I could have been but was
not, the clock repairman lost in the Swiss coils of time,
eyes ruined by the hours and the hours, the antiquated milkman
leaving frost-rimmed bottles on the doorstep of a 1950s
educational film, that bird boy at the door,
terrified by the split atom, by Sputnik, by his mother's zombie
absolution.
That was not me.
No, not so specific as that.
Not this morning, which is not the same morning in my dream.
Strange to think now there were two of them,
one in which my name is Paul Guest,
and one in which I can't read the tag pressed
to my chest or the name on my birth certificate.
Nothing in this morning speaks any language I know.
Maybe I've fallen into the mind's endless Russia.
Maybe the stream has piled against my mind
like snow and the cold radiates everywhere.
Through the windows and the door it
comes like a battering ram, announcing itself
with splinters.
But no dream ever laughs, not even
the terrified ones, the ones from which all floors have fled
and everything is gravity and velocity,
and at the dream's end is death."
I mentioned shutting a vinyl coat in the car door
in that poem.
And it goes back to when I was in the first grade.
How many of you watched the remake of Battlestar Galactica
recently?
You liked it?
It was awesome, right?
Well, the original show was kind of really cheesy.
But I thought it was awesome because I didn't know better.
And anyway, I had a maroon vinyl Battlestar Galactica raincoat.
And I thought I was the baddest guy ever.
And so our family had a station wagon with the wood paneling
down the side.
And one day, my mom had picked me up
and was getting out of the car and go back in the house,
and I was just getting out.
I shut my vinyl Battlestar Galactica coat in the car door.
And it just tore it.
And that was maybe my first heartbreak,
I think, because it would never be the same.
And my mom said, well, I can tape it.
I'm like, no.