WEBVTT

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I'd now like to turn to
some rather different poems

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that I've been writing
in the last year or so.

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And none of these
have been published.

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You notice that I was
varying in these poems I've

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been reading so far between
meter and free verse.

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In that time here, I think there
are different potentialities

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for both of them
and I don't want

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to give up meter
for a free verse,

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since there are things I
feel, I can do in that,

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that I can't do so
well in free verse.

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However, the rest of the
poems I'll be reading

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are in free verse or open forms.

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This next one is called
"The Idea of Trust."

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This is based on something
that happened to somebody in it

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I referred to as Pretty Jim.

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The people living above
me in San Francisco

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got robbed and one time.

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The girl came down
and said, somebody

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ripped us off everything.

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So I said, do you
know who did it?

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And she said yeah, it was Jim.

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So I said Jim, which Jim?

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There was lots of
people around there.

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And she said pretty Jim.

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And I know it once.

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It was people always call
him that for some reason

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mainly because he had no
other characteristics.

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[LAUGHTER]

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He never said anything
and but the day

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after this theft occurred,
somebody else who lived out

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there, told me that he had had
a long conversation with Jim

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and Jim was not at all dumb.

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He actually used
polysyllabic words

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and he had come up with an
extraordinary statement which

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I bring into the poem.

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He said to this
guy, just the day

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before he robbed the household.

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He said trust is an
intimate conspiracy.

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So this poem is
about all of that.

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"The Idea of Trust,"
the poem is called.

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The idea of trust or the thief.

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He was always around,
pretty Jim like a lilac bush

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or a nice picture on the wall.

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Blue eyes of an intense
vagueness and the well

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arranged bearing of an animal.

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Then one day he
said something, he

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said that trust is an
intimate conspiracy.

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What did that mean?

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Anyway next day he was gone
with all the money and dope

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of the people he'd lived with.

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I begin to understand, I see
him picking through their things

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at his leisure with a
quiet secret smile choosing

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and taking, having first
discovered and set up

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his phrase to scramble that
message of enveloping trust.

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He's getting free, his eyes
are almost transparent.

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He has put on gloves, he
fingers the little privacies

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of those who acted as if
there should be no privacy.

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They took that risk, wild
lilac chokes the garden.

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