WEBVTT

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Every once in a while
just to test myself,

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I arbitrarily pick a
word, a pretty hard word

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from the dictionary
and force myself

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to write a poem about it.

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I'm sure some of you
have done the same thing.

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It's, I think, a
pretty good exercise.

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Usually it's pretty fruitless.

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But once in a while, it leads
you into pretty strange alleys.

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So I think I picked
what, to me at least,

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is the toughest
word of them all.

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Each of us would have
his own toughest word.

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But mine was
"rutabaga. " And to me,

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I don't think I've
ever eaten a rutabaga,

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and I'm not sure what they are.

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But they seem to me
like stinking turnips.

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I've always had bad
associations with them.

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And all the better
reason, of course,

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to force oneself to
write a poem about it.

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One word in here is the yatagan.

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It's a-- that's a curvy
sword, a curvy Turkish sword.

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I think you've seen them.

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"Rutabagas."

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"When the fireman gets
home, he tries to be gentle.

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All he wants from his wife,
distraught with homemaking,

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is a steaming bowl
of mashed rutabagas.

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[LAUGHING]

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Just imagine sitting in the
station for 14 days and nothing

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happens.

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You have to imagine your work,
the house itching with flames,

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and the little girls with
eyes grown into horse

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chestnuts ready to
jump if you don't come.

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After the tension of that
hiatus, he needs to face it,

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to feel it in his hands as
the wealthy esthete does

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thinking about it for years.

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And then seeing the right
painting, love at for a sight,

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takes it home, a
kind of happiness,

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a kind of homogenized
yellow satisfaction,

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a sensation that might be hot
or cold, pleasure or pain.

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And so finished, he
scrapes back in his chair

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and off at last to real
sleep, to be greeted

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by the mongrel dog wide awake in
the middle of the bed mouthing

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the sock, the tongue, the
orange yatagan that did her

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in, reborn victim
of the fire within,

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talking about it all night
long, enough to drive

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any fireman mad."

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