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Touch Me

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The blood from my palm runs across the rocky surface of the shell. I push the knife into the crease again, searching for a weakness, the one space where the two sides will gasp and then separate. You tell me it doesn’t matter.

Dick Be Gone

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One thing about being a musician—more specifically a drummer—struggling against the cost of living—more specifically the cost of living in the Bay Area—is that I will do just about anything to earn money.

The man-faced boy

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And so the man-faced boy grew alone, knowing little of kindness and love. As he grew, he explored the limits of his cold world; crawling in dusty nappies, toddling in hand-me-down rags, at last walking on worn sandals, haunting the edges of human life loo

Notes on Consulting the 'Owner's Manual for the Human Mind'!

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[CAUTION: TO PREVENT ELECTRIC SHOCK, DO NOT REMOVE COVER. NO USER-SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE. REFER SERVICE TO QUALIFIED SERVICE PERSONNEL.]

Letting Go

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Jerrod's lips and tongue were like slabs of bologna someone shook in Kirsten’s face as she hit the turn signal. Kirsten was proud of herself. She'd been taking it well and she was pretty sure her real feelings weren’t poking through.

yaaaay i got the job at deutsche bank!!!!! 5 people like this.

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you'll call it jealousy, but i promise youit's really not, because i wouldn't liketo have your life any more than i wouldmine. because really, i lead a life notunlike that of a housecat, knockingaround and getting spooked by closingdoors when i know nobody is in. what…

Folded Flower

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Attached in the center were the petals of a small flower pressed in wax paper. Uncreased, she read it out loud

Ninja

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She catches my head in a leg scissors and says for me to say Ninja Uncle. Instead, I bite into her flesh that only remotely tastes like a soft salt pretzel.

Myra's Lesson

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There’s no training course available for kids in love. You can watch your parents, you can watch other kids, but for the most part it’s all trial and error, and I'm still pretty shaky at almost all of it.

Funeral

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After the funeral there was a luncheon in the church basement.

Kraków Correspondence

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The SS and Gestapo began rounding us up, at least those who aren’t registered, those without yellow cards, today. Rumor has it they got at least 1,000 and took them to the camp, to the barracks. I tried not to watch and only listened, only heard some of t

God Wants a Sandwich

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Two cars smashed together, the sky started to look like a foot infected with gout...

Oedipus Speaks

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I don’t know what happened. One day I was in her room, groping the various drawers for hidden condoms, glimpses of women’s undergarments and I found a spectacular pair of blue lace panties

drinking buddies

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Tonight, Bukowski and I drink together.

Taking a Job

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Teaching never occurred to me in college. I took workshops and wrote often. Friends and classmates, meanwhile, switched from studio majors to Art Education, or from English to Certification. Not me. Teaching high-schoolers would be all wrong. Briefly, I…

Hysteria

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On the birthday before he started school, he received a pencil case from his paternal grandparents. The violet, oblong pouch contained a pencil and a pencil sharpener in the same color. He didn't remember what had happened with the pencil or the sharpener, but he had…

Giacometti

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He tells me that only a few things had happened in his life but some of them he had felt deeply.

Nope.

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Can't cope. Got no hope. Got no dope. Call the Pope. Get the rope.

Flashes

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The thunder rolled like an old Bob Dylan tour...

Brink of Extinction_Chapter One

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The year is 2110. The earth is no longer habitual for human beings. The oceans are gone, the sky is red and radiated and the last vestiges of human civilian are located within the confines of massive barrier cities. For a century mankind has been at war w

The Spoken World

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The spoken world is bigger than I had ever imagined it to be, wonderful and relentless and unforgiving, and to be a part of it was my grandest childhood fantasy. I don’t know what the world sees me as now, but inside I will always be a stutterer.

The World Has Let Me Down

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My mother and I are close We talk like friends I tell her about people I'm dating She gets excited for me And she asks how it's going When I tell her I think I'm gay She says nothing She does not ask about the woman I am seeing She does not ask how I am doing …

If There is an Airport

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If there is an airport, it is one of dreams. If there is a dream, it is one of shadows. If there are shadows, there is not much more but the thoughts of a short man meeting a short woman on a runway of forbidden desires, in a foreign city belonging to n

The She-Wolf of Leningrad

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The heavyset blind woman came into the art opening without a dog or a cane.

Bed Bugs are Jumpin' in Thunder Bay

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The little Hannibal Lectors had run like bandits away from the flames and had latched on to their equipment and gear. They screamed as the bugs crawled all over them. When they got back to the station they had to quarantine all their stuff so the bugs w

Magnum Opus

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The scaffolding had been difficult to construct. The rock floor of the bluff offered no purchase, so he'd been forced to anchor braces to the trees behind, then span some thirty feet. A cantilevered gallows reached another fifteen feet past the stage...

Loveletters

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The leadoff hitter must be comfortable accepting that he will almost never be the hero and will not be anyone's favorite and he will not be the baseball card that is traded for simply because his skills and abilities are subtle.

Rain

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That was what I said, let's go before it starts raining again. I stand at the window, staring at the downpour outside. Since then the sun has gone down a precise one thousand four hundred and sixty one times.

Charlotte

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Half way through our cigarettes she told me her name was Charlotte.

Dear Mouth

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...you vigorously screamed blasphemies at inanimate objects