I'll read a poem now.
I want to dedicate this poem to my friend, Gibb Windahl.
This is called "Self-improvement."
See, generically, it's a narrative poem
with a meditative overlay and a metaphorical embellishment
like rich frosting.
It's called "Self-improvement."
Just before she flew off like a swan
to her wealthy parents' summer home,
Bruce's college girlfriend asked him to improve his expertise
at oral sex, and offered him some technical advice:
use nothing but his tongue tip to flick the light switch
in his room on and off 100 times a day
until he grew fluent at the nuances of force and latitude.
Imagine him at practice every evening,
more inspired than he ever was by algebra,
beads of sweat sprouting on his brow thinking
37, 38, seeing, in the tunnel vision
of his mind's eye, the quadratic equation of her climax yield
to the logic of his simple math.
Maybe he unscrewed the bulb from the apartment ceiling
so that passersby would not believe a giant firefly was
pulsing its electric abdomen in 13 B.
Maybe, as he stood two inches from the wall,
in darkness, fogging the old plaster with his breath,
he visualized the future as a mansion,
rising from the hillside of the shore
that he was rowing to with his tongue's exhausted oar.
Of course, the girlfriend dumped him--
met someone apres-ski, who, using nothing but his nose,
could identify the vintage of a Cabernet.
Sometimes we are asked to get good
at something we have no talent for,
or we excel at something we will never
have the opportunity to prove.
Often we ask ourselves to make absolute sense out
of what just happens, and in this way, what we are practicing
is suffering, which everybody practices,
but strangely few of us grow graceful in.
The climaxes of suffering are costly, complex, beautiful,
but secret.
Bruce never played the light switch again.
So the avenues we walk down, full of bodies wearing
faces, are full of hidden talent--
enough to make pianos moan, sidewalks split, streetlights
deliriously flicker.
Thank you.