I read this one last night.
Sorry, I'm trying to read different ones from--
I don't want to bore Diana and Tyler.
But--
[LAUGHTER]
--this poem, I was thinking about how strange
it is when things go viral.
You know that expression, "going viral."
You're familiar with that expression, right-- "go viral."
[CHUCKLES]
And I was thinking about, sometimes, poems go viral.
And so I was thinking about how strange and horrible
it would be if your poem went viral
and what that might do to your psyche as a poet.
So this poem is written from the point
of view of imagining what that would be like.
It's called "The Black Bird."
"I wrote a poem once.
I thought it was, to be honest, just OK.
Then it went viral.
Everyone loved it, and, soon enough, I almost did too.
Though, I also knew something nameless
I pushed down ever deeper.
I wrote more, a whole book named after the viral poem.
It won all the awards.
People even really named a whole conference after it
and wept when they even thought about it.
It was far too much.
So extreme, it had to be real what I had done.
Now, whenever I try to write, I feel
so afraid of feeling nothing.
So I just write 'house' and 'war' and 'dapple.'
Everyone smiles and says, 'yes.'
But, really, I just want to get high and sit
on the porch of my heart--
yes, of my heart, that's what I said--
where I can watch the city go by, and imagine buildings
have feelings.
But whenever I close my eyes, and try to go there,
I only see a black bird, with a yellow beak, staring at me.
I keep waiting, but it just stares back at me
and does not speak, even one word, from the other world.