A certain poet
having decided to outdo
the great twelfth century master
Lu You by surpassing
his output of some nine thousand
surviving poems
an impressive number
though less than half
the twenty thousand
that Chinese prodigy
is reputed to have written
once our poet
had passed the seven thousand mark
he'd so forgotten
his early work that he began
writing the exact same poems
word for word
only from time to time
he changed the line breaks
and this went on
for many years
this duplication of his former work
so that in later times
the academic critics
and eager graduate students
had much to argue over
what was the meaning
of the slightly shifted lines
and in truth
many a doctoral thesis
emerged from just this
quirk of forgetfulness
which only proves
ah but what does it prove?