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61 on completing my phd A Professoreal [sic] Joke It’s June: the universities to prove the sun can shine are hanging their late bloomers on the academic line Emerging from the libraries blinking like a bat looking at a tree we wonder What the hell is that? And I who’ve developed a twitch a tic a cough can’t tell if I am finished or only finished off I learned Byron had a clubfoot Nietzsche’s health was drastic Poe was a dipsomaniac And I’m already spastic I learned that Shakespeare really lived so scholars have decided Though quite a few have studied me they’re not as sure that I did 62 But I can laugh at past mistakes now that I’ve reached the harbor I put my wife on microfilm and sent her to Ann Arbor I took my daughter Gretchen out and my son whatshisname I lost them in the stacks somehow: home’s never been the same Now I’m alone but free at last to wander in the meadows the world’s leading authority on Thomas Lovell Beddoes ...

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