WEBVTT

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I just got a
cellphone this week.

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I don't know how to work it.

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But before I got the cell phone,
I had an answering machine,

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and I also didn't
know how to work that.

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Who's running the
gag lines here?

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Karen.

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Wait till you read.

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Wait till you read.

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Karen Brennan, your next reader.

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But I don't actually
make a lot of calls,

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and I don't actually
get a lot of calls.

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So in many ways, the answering
machine was superfluous,

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but there was just this image
of this sort of digital zero

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in the middle of it that I
kept seeing all the time.

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"The Zero on the
Answering Machine."

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Back when I drank, I didn't
give a fuck or if I did,

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I did something dramatic,
and not infrequently, final.

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I don't know if you can relate.

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I don't know if you've ever
stared into the red-rimmed eye,

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the digital knot in
some of your life,

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and said nothing,
and said it too late.

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October, with its O like
over, And the cold rain

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that has fallen
steadily all morning

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seems somehow to have
entered this poem.

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How do the wrens, those
dun paupers, abide?

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Back when, huddled inside
the birdhouse of the bottle,

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I wanted to feel nothing.

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What I felt, instead, was the
feeling of feeling nothing,

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and felt it acutely.

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All my dull remorses
sharpening their knives.

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It was, then, less
revelatory than bemusing.

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The abrupt flare of a light bulb
above the head of a light bulb,

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such was my cartoon.

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Whatever I said bled from
my mouth like roadkill

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in the talons of
quotation marks.

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So much dictation, I never
raised my head from the page

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to see above me the
sleek migrations

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nor the bleak swollen gape of
the sky, opening, and opening,

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and how to close it now?

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I don't know.

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If you can relate,
you may have a date

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with your own extinctions.

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I hope you arrive discreetly.

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I hope you retrieve
the message I left--

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Long time no see.

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Meet me?

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