So pardon me.
I take a lot of medicine because I'm sick.
Mostly it's emotional, but it comes out physically.
And they dry you out like antihistamines.
Codeine pills for my headaches, why grains for my migraines.
[LAUGHTER]
Librax from my nervous stomach.
And take a bunch of those in one day, and you just dry totally.
[LAUGHTER]
You're also doped up.
[LAUGHTER]
And you talk a lot.
[LAUGHS] From that anthology--
another poetry anthology, there's
only two poems that I really like in there.
And "Hangman" is one of them and "The Color Thief" is the other.
And I guess I'm reading both of them tonight.
This is "Hangman."
"In the fields, the silos open their mouths
and let the grain dribble down their sides
for they are overflowing.
The farmers swing their sides, brows dripping blood.
They have had the passion ripped out of their chests
and share no brotherhood with a wheat.
While far across the open land, the Hangman
mounts an empty scaffold.
He slides his hands over the course grain cedar
and smells a whole Lebanese coast
in the upraised arms of Kansas.
The rope stiff bristles prick his fingers
as he holds it and lifts himself above the trap door.
He touches the wood again.
This will be his last hanging.
And any way, he has seen other fields.
Workmen nailing brass spikes into the scaffolds and rope,
which coiled and uncoiled in the laps of farm women.
He places his foot on the step, going down,
and nearby a scarecrow explodes, sending tiny slivers of straw
into his eyes."