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Poet's Choice

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prove this) sneaky: their spies could spirit all

our nuke aids away and we'd never know --

nick the rocket-satellite knockout Star Peace

Comcodes right out of our shrinking pockets,

even our doomsday (the FBI can prove this)

doodads, the ones we mean to use on them,

the rats: and so when they kill us will we

have killed enough of them to win, whose

fist figures bigger in the end? And what's it prove? --

In the Orphanage, hell, even if they do tell

on you there's no one for them to tell it to.

Through pathological paranoia, Knott says, we create our own hell -- that final, capital-O Orphanage -- in which no celestial parent remains to hear our pious tattling.

"The only response," "Death" and "Some of My Problems" appear in Bill Knott's "Selected and Collected Poems." Copyright 1977 by Bill Knott. Reprinted with permission from Sun Press. "A Lesson From the Orphanage" is from "The Unsubscriber: Poems." Copyright 2004 by Bill Knott. Reprinted with permission of Farrar Straus Giroux.

Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."

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