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I also found waking up, so to speak, was a journey with lots of twists and turns and missteps and surprises and moving forward. A few poems in the early 1990s seemed to forecast how it would be going for me. Here's the first.

Dead poets are poets who never write

Who obey shoulds and oughts

Who live to please others

Who value money over God

Who die without ever having lived

Death is their mark

Dead poets are remembered by the living.

Living poets are remembered by time

Dead poets never sing their song

Living poets nover stop singing it

The difference between the two is this:

One worships fear, the other life

To be a dead poet is hard

It requires being someone else

To be a living poet is easy

It only means being myself

One choice is hell, the other heaven

That is what is meant by free will

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Jan 26, 2023Liked by Poetic Outlaws

Extra credit: a weird but weirdly compelling story by the great Irish writer Kevin Barry about Roethke's time in what was then called an insane asylum:

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/kevin-barry-short-story-roethke-in-the-bughouse-1.2308905

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