Well, here's another-- this time when I slightly go--
what I want to do now?
I don't know.
Let me see something entirely different as Monty Python says
or something entirely different something.
This is a poem called "Henri Rousseau's Bed,"
the painter, the primitive painter, Rousseau.
I used to hate writing--
I mean, the idea of people writing poems about paintings.
I wish that they all ended up in red China
so Mao could send them to work in the rice fields.
[LAUGHTER]
But that was years ago.
If somebody says something to me about Rousseau and--
I don't know.
You'll see.
"Henri Rousseau's Bed," "I took my bed into the forest.
How peaceful, I thought.
When the full moon came out, the white stag nibbled my pillow.
The night bird sang in the hand of the huge hairy ape.
It was not a bird of paradise.
It was a gypsy with a mandolin.
I had to run naked with my bed, knock at the prison gate,
ask for their darkest solitary.
They obliged, rats and all.
The executioner's lovely daughter
coming to visit on tiptoes.
Sad bread she brought, the world's saddest.
Her beauty bandaged my eyes.
No small feat to get that bed out
of there on insomnia's bicycle.
Like a worm crossing the Brooklyn Bridge,
I found myself in a philosopher's kitchen.
It was cold and white as at the Pole.
Snow kept falling into empty pots.
I could have used a team of dogs to pull my bed,
a queue of sleepwalkers.
At the late movies where I found myself next,
bedded under the screen, the great Egyptian-style theater
empty, one could hear the wind between stars.
In the picture, a lonely veiled woman clutched a handkerchief
to her breast.
Are you the gypsy, I shouted?
And if so, where is your mandolin?
No, she replied.
I'm the executioner's lovely daughter.
I'm on my way to the Galapagos Islands.
I need tortoise glasses to look for my love who
is asleep in a dark forest."