Good evening.
I read in this room 12 years ago.
And it's great to be back.
I write long poems and have time for three of them,
but I don't write epic poems.
In an epic poem, there has to be a hero
and he has to do something.
And I vowed that I would write an epic poem, where I would
be the hero and do something.
And all I could do was shift from one foot to the other.
That poem is called "Litany in Which Certain Things Are
Crossed Out."
Every morning the maple leafs.
Every morning another chapter, where the hero shifts from one
foot to another.
Every morning the same big and little words
all spelling out desire.
All spelling out you will be alone always
and then you will die.
So maybe I wanted to give you something
more than a catalog of non-definitive acts,
something other than the desperation.
Dear So-and-So, I'm sorry I couldn't come to your party.
Dear So-and-So, I'm sorry I came to your party
and seduced and ruined you, you poor sad thing.
You want a better story.
Who wouldn't?
A forest, then.
Beautiful trees.
And the lady singing.
Love on the water, love underwater, love,
love and so on.
What a sweet lady.
Sing, lady, sing.
Of course, she wakes the dragon.
Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly flames everywhere.
I can tell already you think I'm the dragon, that would
be so like me, but I'm not.
I'm not the dragon.
I'm not the princess either.
Who am I?
I'm just a writer.
I write things down.
I walk through your dreams and invent the future.
Sure, I sink the boat of love, but that comes later.
And yes, I swallow glass, but that comes later.
And the part where I push you flush against the wall
and every part of your body rubs against the bricks, shut up,
I'm getting to it.
For a while I thought I was the dragon.
I guess I can tell you that now.
And, for a while, I thought I was the princess.
Cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room
in the tower of the castle.
Young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you
with confidence.
But the princess looks into her mirror
and only sees the princess.
While I'm out here, slogging through the mud, breathing,
fire and getting stabbed to death.
OK, I'm the dragon, big deal.
You still get to be the hero.
You get magic gloves, a fish that talks.
You get eyes like flashlights.
What more do you want?
I make you pancakes, I take you hunting,
I talk to you as if you're really there.
Are you there sweetheart?
Do you know me?
Is this microphone live?
Let me do it right, for once, for the record.
Let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes,
you know the story, simply heaven.
Inside your head, you hear a phone ringing.
And when you open your eyes, only a clearing
with a deer in it.
Hello, deer.
Inside your head the sound of glass,
a car crash sound as the trucks roll over
and explode in slow motion.
Sorry, darling.
Sorry about that.
Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry
we lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom
of the stairwell and how I ruined everything by saying it
out loud, especially that.
But I should have known.
You see, I take the parts that I remember
and stitch them back together to make a creature that will
do what I say, or love me back.
I'm not really sure why I do, it but in this version
you are not feeding yourself to a bad man against a black sky
prickled with small lights.
I take it back.
The wooden horse like caskets, these terms from the lower
depths, I take them back.
Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.
Crossed out.
Clumsy hands in a dark room.
Crossed out.
There is something underneath the floorboards.
Crossed out.
And here's the tabernacle reconstructed.
Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time.
And we were all forgiven, even though we didn't deserve it.
Inside your head, you hear a phone ringing.
And when you open your eyes, you're
washing up in a stranger's bathroom.
Standing by the window in the yellow towel.
Only 20 minutes away from the dirtiest thing you know.
The rooms in the castle, except this one, says someone.
And suddenly darkness, suddenly only darkness.
In the living room, in the broken yard,
in the back of the cars the lights go by.
In the airport bathroom's gurgle and flush,
bathed in a pharmacy of unnatural light.
My hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away.
And then the airplane, the window seat over the wing
with a view of the wing and a little foil bag of peanuts.
I arrived in the city and you met me at the station,
smiling in a way that made me frightened.
Down the alley, around the arcade,
up the stairs of the building to the little room
with the broken faucets.
Your drawings, all your things, I looked out the window
and said, this doesn't look that much different from home,
because it didn't.
But then I noticed the black sky and all those legs.
We walked through the house to the elevated train.
All of these buildings, all that glass,
and the shiny, beautiful, mechanical, wind.
We were inside the train car when I started to cry.
You were crying too.
Smiling and crying in a way that made me even more hysterical.
You said I could have anything I wanted,
but I just couldn't say it out loud.
Actually, you said, love for you is larger
than the usual romantic love.
It's like a religion.
It's terrifying.
No one will ever want to sleep with you.
OK, if you're so great, you do it.
Here's the pencil, make it work.
If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed.
If the window is over your heart and it is painted shut,
then we are breathing river water.
Build me a city and call it Jerusalem.
Build me another and call it Jerusalem.
We have come back from Jerusalem, where we found not
what we sought, so do it over.
Give me another version, a different room,
another hallway, the kitchen painted over and over,
another bowl of soup.
The entire history of human design
takes about 70 minutes to tell.
Unfortunately, we don't have that kind of time.
Forget the dragon.
Leave the gun on the table, this has
nothing to do with happiness.
Let's jump ahead to the moment of epiphany
in gold light as the camera pans to where the action is.
Lakeside and backlit and it all falls into frame, close enough
to see the blue rings of my eyes as I say something ugly.
I never liked that ending either.
More love streaming out the wrong way.
And I don't want to be the kind that says the wrong way.
But it doesn't work.
These erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats.
There were some nice parts, sure.
All lemondrop and melonball, laughing and silk pajamas
and the grains of sugar on the toast, love love or whatever.
Take a number.
I'm sorry it's such a lousy story.
Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently we
have had our difficulties and there are
many things I want to ask you.
I tried that one time, high school, second lunch, and then
again, years later in the chlorinated pool.
I am still talking to you about help.
I still do not have these luxuries.
I've told you where I'm coming from.
So put it together.
We clench our bellies and roll on the floor.
When I say this, it should mean laughter, not poison.
I want more applesauce.
I want more seats reserved for heroes.
Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you.
Quit milling around the yard and come inside.