I don't know if I want to read you that.
I wrote a whole bunch of poems in the middle
that I'm not going to read to you, maybe I'll tell you about.
They're called "Marfa, Texas."
I went to Marfa, has anyone been there?
Probably a lot of you, yeah.
It's a really cool art town and there's
a lot of Donald Judd work there, which is very rectangular,
so I wrote these poems and put them into little rectangles,
but I put them in the middle of the book,
and they were really fun to write.
They were actually letters to-- home letters to a friend.
And then I wrote a bunch of little tiny poems
that at the end are called "Love Letters,"
and they're actually like the assignment from the Los Angeles
County Public Library was to write
hopeful poems, and for a poet like me, that's very difficult.
So they were running across LED lights
to the public at libraries all across LA,
and so were poems that the other people had
written that we had selected.
So I'll just read you the last one, two, three, five of these.
It was my attempt to be hopeful, I
don't know if ultimately I'm successful or not,
but I'll read them to you.
Actually, I'll read you the last ones there, these.
There is a bird and a stone in your body.
Your job is not to kill the bird with the stone.
Not that hopeful, right?
Some of us are made only of nerve endings.
At night, we light up like radium.
A little more?
Little more, getting there by the end.
One day you will wake up beating, one day you'll wake up
winged.
A little more?
Let me tell you a story about hope:
it always starts and ends with birds.