When I was in college, I used to go to poetry readings pretty regularly. One of my favorite poems of all time was from one of these readings. A guy gets up, kind of nebbishy, shaking a little bit I assumed from nerves, the paper rattling in his hand, tentative voice into the microphone:
Relationships
And if you've been to many poetry readings, you're picturing immediately where this poem is going: there will be a metaphor, there will be
line
breaks
there may be a few really nice images, the kind that pour from the reader's mouth and float up around his head like Disney helpers before slowly evaporating from memory, there may be a line you write down in your notebook to store for later.
So there he stood, in my memory he has glasses, and he read in his quiet bookish voice, "Relationships" and paused, and looked out at the audience, and
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