WEBVTT

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Don't know how my time is going.

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I'm going to skip a poem
in this thematic group

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and drop the theme.

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Read a poem that I like to read
at universities because, well,

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you'll see why.

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I went on a binge
once are reading

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biographies and autobiographies
of famous literary men.

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And I think because they
were modern biographies

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and autobiographies.

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And therefore tried to strip
away the myth from the man

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and make him human.

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It turned out that
everyone I read

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led me to believe that these
famous literary men had

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made the lives of their own
children perfectly miserable.

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And at the same time, that all
these books brought this to me.

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I remembered, of course, that
these very same literary men

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had served perfectly as parents
to thousands of other people's

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children through their books.

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That is these young people
had tested themselves

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against these
men's books as they

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do against the ideal parent,
had learned from them,

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had used them in
writing their papers

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and so on, used them up indeed.

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So out of this little paradox,
I wrote this short poem

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called Relationships.

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The legal children
of a literary man

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remember his ugly
words to their mother.

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He made them keep quiet
and kiss them later.

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He made them stop fighting
and finish their supper.

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His stink in the bathroom
sickened their noses.

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He left them with sitters
and lonesome houses.

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He mounted their mother
and made them wear braces.

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He fattened on fame
and raised them thin.

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But the secret sons
of the same man spring

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up like weeds from
the seed of his word.

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They eat from his hand
and it is not hard.

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They unravel his sweater
and swing from his beard.

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They smell in their sleep
his ferns and roses.

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They hunt the Fox
on his giant horses.

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They slapped their mother
repeating his phrases and swell

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in his sight and suck him thin.

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