Cummings was the first poet I really loved when I was 11 or 12. I would buy all those paperbacks but eventually I got myself the Complete Poems. This is a poem that my little brother liked; I would have been 14 and he is seven years younger:

If you can't eat you got to

smoke and we aint got
nothing to smoke:come on kid

let's go to sleep
if you can't smoke you got to

Sing and we aint got

nothing to sing;come on kid
let's go to sleep

if you can't sing you got to
die and we aint got

Nothing to die,come on kid

let's go to sleep
if you can't die you got to

dream and we aint got
nothing to dream(come on kid

Let's go to sleep)

I had always had conserved a fond memory of the reading that Michael Caine did of Cumming's "somewhere i have never travelled" in Woody Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters." So I watched the film again on netflix online. The poem does appear there, but Caine does not read it aloud: the Barbara Hershey character does instead, and only the last few lines of it at that. I still think they cut out that part on the netflix streaming version, that it must be in the film. I can hear Caine's voice reading it in my memory, with his very distinctive accent and intonation.

But this is probably just a retrospective hallucination: a hallucination of memory.