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I'm going to finish
with a happier poem.

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"The Poet in Heaven."

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"What's heaven
after all but chaos,

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neatened up into
the good and the bad

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and the undecided, those rakes,
those corseted mamas, who

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wait in the foyer for the
cool unguent of the beyond,

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their fortunes of tomorrow?

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Well, my soul has come to
be courted, to be wooed,

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to be won over to
the good or not.

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After all, while the industrious
set their grindstones

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to their noses, their
wheels to their shoulders,

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I've been a great, exuberant
fund of misbehavior.

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Like the sea, that indolent
lagoon lapping at the sand

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and creeping toward
the barbecue,

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I teach by showing
what not to do.

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Like the lily, I neither
toil nor spin, but simply am,

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apparelled in beauty, unworthy,
unearning, un-Protestant,

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and slightly screwy, really,
because who in her right mind

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would not want the Prince
of Love, so blond, so

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tall, so good?

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In the great body of great
works, I'm an inexplicability.

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Like Penelope, I can't decide.

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I'm that tousled, sweating
heroine at the blackboard,

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head bowed, whose sponge erases
like damp prose the right

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and wrong in one bold stroke
and leaves only that blurred

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and blurry path between
this lesson and the next,

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what she was supposed
to know and didn't.

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I am a pebble under
the boots of history,

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a loose thread, nothing, really,
the unimportant and, therefore,

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immortal."

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Thank you.

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[APPLAUSE]

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