WEBVTT

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This one is entitled "White
Dwarves," and it's for Chris.

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I want to believe the
Aztecs, that once you

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eat the heart of a dragon, you
can understand animal language.

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I want to believe that
Andromeda M31 is just a mirage.

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Today, someone has been crying
in the house across the street.

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Someone is masturbating
just up the road right now.

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They sound the same to me.

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We aren't that different from
the cicadas or the century

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plant.

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All we do is die.

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The sounds we push
out into the universe

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take their time to arrive.

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Just yesterday, the radio
waves we've been shooting out

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into space since
the '50s reached

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the corner of our solar system.

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Somewhere, a boy is
just beginning puberty,

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his bones mimicking the slow
stretch of the universe.

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When he speaks in
his sleep, tonight he

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won't notice the small
crackling in his voice.

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The new word grows old.

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Time slips his hands in
our pockets and laughs.

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It happens again.

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I started by writing, the
story ends with your brother

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Matt peeling the tabby
from the pavement,

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the skull crushed, the
spots on its stomach little

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constellations.

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A name, the body milk warm.

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He places it on the sidewalk,
can't look at his date.

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She says, I think that's my cat.

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I think that's my
cat, and knows.

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Then lightning.

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The long drive
home, where you pass

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the remains of a car
with its passengers

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burned to death inside.

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A year of sleeplessness, night
terrors, and waking to women

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you don't love.

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Your ex still
possessing your bones.

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This is an apology,
because in Thailand, a monk

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gathers boys for the sex trade
and sells them to miserable

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bastards here in the West.

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Because Kamajors behead RUF
soldiers in Sierra Leone,

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and RUF cut off Kamajor hands
and dicks, spike them on poles,

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and parade the streets.

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In China, poachers
kill endangered tigers,

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make Viagra from their bones.

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You said, we are not here
to be happy, and I agree.

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This is what we do.

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Drink alone at dive
bars, reading Bukowski,

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crying for the woman raped
on the reservation who

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can't tell her friends.

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Once, you were so drunk you
pissed on a stranger's lawn,

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looking in through the
window at the family.

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Once, a brunette sat
down at the table with us

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and barked, where
does this lead?

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That poor woman.

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If only the cat didn't
have spots or she

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hadn't seen it
lying in the road.

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If only her father hadn't
died a week before, and maybe

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if your brother had
known just what to say.

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Yesterday, someone
smashed my car window,

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but only stole a pair of
shoes from the backseat.

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Yesterday, you woke with
a pain in your chest,

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coughing up black
phlegm, and afraid

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your mother is going blind.

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Look what we do to ourselves,
slipping a chloroform

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rag under our noses,
lacing our love with PCP.

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All we can do is survive, like
the boy in the Syrian home

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found days after an
operation to retrieve corpses

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from a massacre.

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How he hid beneath the
bodies of his parents,

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how he must have cried.

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You cried the same way
the night the doctors

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said your brother
would be a vegetable.

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After two hits of
acid pepped with PCP,

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Matt threw himself
through a window.

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This world is beautiful
only because of

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the massive black hole pulling
all our light into its heart.

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Only because the scrub jay
witness to its own mortality

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sings in alarm for
its dead, until it

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is drawn during the body
in a prayer only understood

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by the ash of the forest.

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Stretching away from its
origin like our universe,

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it will soon collapse.

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Let us die dreaming, pretending
we will go on forever,

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voice as large as
the terracotta army

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in the tomb of Qin Shi Huang.

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Let us be the paint that
evaporates from their faces.

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Let us be that dust.

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