WEBVTT

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This is the title poem
from my new book Wait

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which will be out at the end
of the year, beginning of next

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and which all these
poems are from.

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"Wait."

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"Chop, hack, slash.

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Chop hack, slash.

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Cleaver, boning knife, axe.

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Not even the clumsiest
clod of a butcher

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could do this so
crudely, time as

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do you dismember me, render
me, leave me slop in a pail.

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One part of my
body 100 years old,

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one not even there anymore.

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Another still riven with idiot
vigor, voracious as the youth

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I was for whom
everything always was

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going too slowly, too slowly.

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It was me then who chopped,
slashed, through you,

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across you, relished
you, gorged on you,

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slugged your invisible
liquor down raw.

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Now you're polluted.

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Pulse, clock, calendar
taint you, befoul you.

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You suck at me, pull at me.

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Barbed wire knots
of memory tear me.

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My heart hangs inert, a
tag end of tissue firing,

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misfiring, trying to heave
itself back to its other way

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with you.

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But was there ever really
any other way with you?

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When I ran as
though for my life,

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wasn't I fleeing
from you or for you?

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Wasn't I frightened you'd fray,
leave me nothing but shreds?

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Aren't I still?

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When I snatch it one of
your moments and clutch it,

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a pebble, a planet, isn't
it wearing away in my hand

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as though I, not you, were the
ocean of acid, the corrosive

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in which I dissolve?

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Wait, though.

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Wait.

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I should tell you
too how happy I am.

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How I love it so much.

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All of it.

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Chopping and slashing and all.

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Please know I love especially
you, how every morning you

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turn over the languorous
earth, for how would she

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know otherwise to
do dawn to do dusk

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when all she hears from her
speech creatures is wait?

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We whose anguished wish is
that our last word not be wait.

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Thank you."

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[APPLAUSE]

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