Some people have asked me why, how come your palms
changed so much?
Well, I have a different typewriter.
[LAUGHS]
I have a new fountain pen.
I don't know.
It change because I told them to.
Nothing I ever told to do anything did it.
When I told my dog to be quiet, he bit me.
My cat scratched me.
My wife joined the Navy.
[LAUGHTER]
My kids smoked dope and won't drink with me.
[LAUGHTER]
It's so boring.
Do they think everything's funny?
Which is all right if it's funny, but it's not, you know.
They're good boys, they're good boys.
It's called your life.
I think that what I assert in this poem
and what I believe I mean, I believe what I'm saying this.
I believe everything I'm saying in these poems,
but I mean, a lot of the things that I
said I don't believe anymore because the poems are old,
and they just don't keep up with me.
[LAUGHS]
Or I fall behind them.
I don't know.
A guy at 30 isn't a guy at 50, you know.
Alas.
[LAUGHTER]
I was in Steve Arlen's class the other day and I said you know,
I said Steve had a headache and you could see it.
I mean.
[LAUGHTER]
It was one of the biggest headaches I've ever seen.
Here, we get a box from railway express and they
got those bands around them.
That's what his headache was like.
He's like that man with that metal band
that didn't know where you can get through it.
And I said, how old are you, Steve?
I think he said 35.
I said, life gets better.
And I turned to the woman next to him.
How old are you?
She said, 28.
It's all life gets a lot better than that.
There's a woman sitting across from me,
who I think was older than I. I hope she was older than I.
And she said, you have a life gets worse.
[LAUGHTER]
And there was a silence, and she said, I mean,
it really gets worse.
And I said OK, I heard you.
Don't say it was so goddamn much conviction.
Well, my life has gotten better.
And I don't know what tomorrow morning I could wake up
a zebra in a zoo, you know.
I have no idea what tomorrow will bring in.
I don't want-- if you know, don't tell me
because I want it to be a nice surprise.
I might be dead, I won't wake up at all.
Now, it is called your life.
I did not know your life was mine.
I had seen you walking sadly by, your head down,
your hands still and hidden.
And I thought I could go to you and ask what the years had done
that couldn't be forgotten.
Instead, I turned inward.
I found along still hours of silence that were childhood.
Once my aunt went away at dawn, and I sat in an empty house
until the front windows darkened and I fell asleep.
That boy never awakened.
The one who did was tall and stronger than I am now.
And he spoke to no one.
He smoked, spit, drove with his eyes closed.
And by himself, he built the road from Gary to Hammond.
That was 30 years ago when a single man was something.
Now I will turn outward to the little clearing
in the woods, where you at last have
kneeled to find the Earth is all the home you need.
I'm beside you.
Feel the warm air at your ear.
It's not the dreaded land wind or the word of God.
It's the breath of one man, a man like any other,
fallen to this Earth as all men have to say your life is mine.