WEBVTT

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I hadn't thought about
reading this one,

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but I think that I will.

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"The zen garden is
nice on the weekends

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but the door will
lock behind you."

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This is a poem about visiting
the VA Hospital in Phoenix.

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"Here we are all thinking and
not thinking about being dead,

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We fight the dogs from our
shoelaces and from each other

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by holding their
well decorated vests.

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This place is full
of bitches though you

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can't say that, though you're
a person rightfully pissed off.

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We don't all want to be heroes,
we don't all want to not die,

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Except for this country, we
don't want to die for that.

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Leaving curved impressions
terminal with no expectation

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in return,

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Leaving room to acknowledge
capitalist patriarchy's

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broad and coercive applications.

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However meager or
capacious the desire,

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our statistics are
inevitably abused.

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Asked again whether
I've considered

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hurting myself or others ever
or in the past two weeks,

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I make a joke about the future,
whose companion story dreams

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itself in the obstacles budding
across every new path to love.

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It's that no path to forgiveness
would look like this.

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I say I'm sorry, I
know this isn't funny.

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But it was also a testimony
to the enormous thing we

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do to the extent we are able.

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Forgiveness from who came a
voice from across the room.

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How long does it take if
nothing was cut or crushed?

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But the day hangs from jangling
hooks above your sorry yellowing

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head.

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Three weeks into
the prescription

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I awoke thinking this is what
it feels like to be white.

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No one disagreed, it
didn't make any sense,

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anyway it didn't last.

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The official formulas for
suffering are mostly subjective.

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I've accepted that I am one
who will never suffer enough,

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A position both intentionally
obscuring and clear.

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A quote from Ruth
Wilson Gilmore,

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'The United States was
conceived in slavery

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and christened by genocide.

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These early practices
established high expectations

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of state aggression against
enemies of the national purpose,

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such as revolutionary slaves
and Indigenous peoples,

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and served as the crucible
for development of a military

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culture that valorized armed men
in uniform as the nation's true

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sacrificial subjects.'

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End quote.

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None of the signs say thank you
for your left arm, or hearing,

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or lymphatic health, or land.

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I want to thank you
for being alive,

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And thank you unfortunately when
it isn't what you want to be.

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Thanks down to
the lines creasing

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your deeply infatuated head.

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I wanted to volunteer for the
vets against war crisis hotline,

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Then I didn't write back or
attend any medical appointments

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that year.

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I'm disappointed by the
cadence of paltry confessions

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I make in order to keep living.

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Later, in the rooms
where we can speak,

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We want to know why do
we feel so emotional."

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