I'm imagining this is Scotch.
Oh.
It will be.
This is a poem that just came out of--
I was trying to write this really long, complex poem that
went five pages.
And it really sucked.
And sometimes, it just shows what you have to go through
to write a really simple poem, [LAUGHS] which is what it turned
out to be--
a short and simple one.
It's called, "My Bomb."
"Better than a dream, it left gargantuan roses
in the Japanese garden.
And the rabbits, heavy as children.
We would crouch in the classroom beneath our desks
and concentrate on being small--
study the white caps of our knees.
Once, we went below the library--
the dark shelves stacked with cans of creamed corn,
green beans, mandarin oranges.
We'd eat like the dead for five years and rise again.
Thus, I learned the catechism--
proton, electron, neutron.
I learned to contemplate the invisible.
I went to sleep in the fire cloud, folding like the brain,
and dreamt about the power of my bomb.
Girls flashing to the sidewalks, cities filigreed, the bird
cinders, light, bright as the mirror on the shoe of God.
And afterward, pink as phoenixes,
the American beauties, pressing their mammoth lips
to the charge of the sky.
This is how I loved the Earth--
with my life, with the pure nuclei of my matter.
How it fell into my hands.
Better than desire, my bomb lit the face of my own 20th century.
I had it, so no one could use it.
I would have more, so no one could have enough."