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"The Man I Killed"

By David ThorburnUpdated Tuesday, March 28, 2006, at 5:15 AM ET

Click here to listen to David Thorburn read this poem.


was in his early 30s, rosaceous,
pocky, the Checker
on a Newark pier. He said

I'll be respected
by Jersey turds
like you reporters

and these Hoboken wankers
still wearing bog shit.
Don't you get it?

I said No pictures.
Later, off the wharf
the camera guy

used a telephoto lens
as I pointed, for my byline story,
Wildcat Strikers

Shut Port Newark.
The next week they found him
floating near a buoy

dead in Bayonne harbor
in a mess of bootleg whiskey
and my story in the paper.

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David Thorburn is professor of literature and director of the Communications Forum at MIT. His most recent books, co-edited with Henry Jenkins, are Democracy and New Media and Rethinking Media Change.
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