WEBVTT

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Thank you, Ander Monson,
for your beautiful work.

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And thank you all for
being here tonight.

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I know there are many readers
and writers in the room.

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And so this first
poem is for you.

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In a long text on live TV, in
an amphitheater, in the soil.

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After the postmoderns,
after it's still proven

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you can get a kiss
out of a pretty girl.

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After the meta-ritual
lectures and Heinz

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switches to plastic
squeeze bottles.

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As one flies into St
Louis listening to Lorca's

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"Luna, Luna, Luna,"
beyond Anacin time.

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After God help us, the
dishwasher is emptied again,

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and Miss America,
Miss Mississippi,

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reveals she has entered
100 pageants since age six.

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Packers ball, first
down after a fumble.

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The corn de-tasseled, the
assembly of enthusiasms

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awakened, and we meet
in a car by a river.

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Not not kissing,
considering making love,

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visiting Jerusalem, the
awful daily knowledge that we

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will have to die in a
hospital on the sixth floor,

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or on live TV, or in an
amphitheater at halftime,

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or it's one's parents'
condo over pasta.

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Or in a strange relative's
arms along the coast.

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The heart bumping, bumping the
old pebble up the old spine,

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a squirrel scared up a
Sycamore by an infant.

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Along this stench of
humility, along that highway

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of come, charge card in hand,
I will give my time freely.

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And the more I dissemble,
the more I resemble,

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the better, the faster
I sleep, the more

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I remember to go elsewhere.

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A movie, excuse me,
now I must whisper

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not to disturb the patrons.

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Now I must drive, park, tramp
to the edge of the world.

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Roughness, ferocity,
cannibalism, bite, chew,

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transmogrified.

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Inside the lungs, the
little revolutionaries.

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Between the thighs of the
reflex, it's too this,

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it's too that.

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It's not enough.

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Similarly, and
more particularly,

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it's raw twice over.

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It's the imagination draining
its husks left handed

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because comparison is
motive, which is why

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one writes with one's desire.

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[APPLAUSE]

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Thank you.

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That was called, thank
you, "Miami Heart,"

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named after a hospital
in South Florida.

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A poem that I presented here
at one of my first readings

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at the Poetry Center.