WEBVTT

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Here's a poem.

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I think, like the
goldfishes poem, that

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tries to have a helpful title.

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I always think title should
be kind of invitational.

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And I have very little
tolerance with poems

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that have titles like
vortex 28 or something.

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[LAUGHTER]

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Where I just feel the
rheostat beginning to go down

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and a mild headache beginning.

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[LAUGHTER]

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So I think titles should be
welcoming and helpful, and not

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knotted and enigmatic.

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But that's just me.

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So the title of the poem
is, "I Chopped Some Parsley

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While Listening to Art Blakey's
Version of Three Blind Mice."

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"And I start to wonder
how they came to be blind.

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If it was congenital, they
could be brothers and sisters.

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[LAUGHTER]

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And I think of the
mother brooding

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over her sightless
young triplets.

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Or was it a common accident?

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All three caught in a searing
explosion-- a firework perhaps.

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If not, if each came to his
or her blindness separately,

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how did they ever manage
to find one another?

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[LAUGHTER]

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Would it not be difficult
for a blind mouse

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to locate even one fellow mouse
with vision, let alone two

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other blind ones?

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[LAUGHTER]

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And how in their
tiny darkness could

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they possibly have run
after a farmer's wife--

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or anyone else's wife,
for that matter--

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not to mention why.

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Just so she could cut off their
tails with a carving knife

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is the cynic's answer.

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[LAUGHTER]

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But the thought of them without
eyes and now without tails--

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[LAUGHTER]

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--to trail through
the moist grass

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or slip around the
corner of a baseboard

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has the cynic who always lounges
within me up off his couch

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and at the window trying to
hide the rising softness that he

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feels.

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By now, I am on to
dicing an onion, which

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might account for the wet
stinging in my own eyes.

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Though Freddie Hubbard's
mournful trumpet

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on "Blue Moon" which
happens to be the next cut--

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cannot be said to be
making matters any better."

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[LAUGHTER]

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[APPLAUSE]

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