WEBVTT

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I don't know if I
want to read you that.

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I wrote a whole bunch
of poems in the middle

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that I'm not going to read to
you, maybe I'll tell you about.

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They're called "Marfa, Texas."

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I went to Marfa, has
anyone been there?

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Probably a lot of you, yeah.

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It's a really cool
art town and there's

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a lot of Donald Judd work there,
which is very rectangular,

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so I wrote these poems and put
them into little rectangles,

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but I put them in the
middle of the book,

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and they were
really fun to write.

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They were actually letters
to-- home letters to a friend.

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And then I wrote a bunch
of little tiny poems

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that at the end are
called "Love Letters,"

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and they're actually like the
assignment from the Los Angeles

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County Public
Library was to write

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hopeful poems, and for a poet
like me, that's very difficult.

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So they were running
across LED lights

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to the public at
libraries all across LA,

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and so were poems that
the other people had

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written that we had selected.

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So I'll just read you the last
one, two, three, five of these.

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It was my attempt
to be hopeful, I

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don't know if ultimately
I'm successful or not,

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but I'll read them to you.

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Actually, I'll read you
the last ones there, these.

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There is a bird and
a stone in your body.

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Your job is not to kill
the bird with the stone.

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Not that hopeful, right?

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Some of us are made
only of nerve endings.

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At night, we light
up like radium.

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A little more?

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Little more, getting
there by the end.

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One day you will wake up
beating, one day you'll wake up

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winged.

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A little more?

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Let me tell you a
story about hope:

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it always starts
and ends with birds.

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