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Houses Are Havens and the Outside Plans Your Destruction

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The first of the fires that started by the river in the abandoned mills were so hot they burned white and pale blue

Osama Retires

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Osama couldn’t see any reason he shouldn’t retire. No way he could top BP Oil in the Gulf or Pacific Gas & Electric in San Bruno.

Eternal Return

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When I slip through the seams I return to the same place.

Honey Gold

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your light is gonna last me through the week

Coffee Foam

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We entered the castle at dawn. The dim light feebly illumined an array of antiques and medieval weapons. Bats dangled from the high vaulted ceiling, enfolded in membranous wings. What were once chandeliers radiating light were encrusted with webs and the ancient wax…

Forbidden Music

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There are songs I know to not listen to when I am alone.

Strange

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Words are looking ever so strange today like a hole in space a wind in a cloud a face superimposed over a mountain

First Rain of the New Year

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Compartments trickle together/ in light diffuse and unreliable./ Fortify yourself against the day.

R.I.P. Ann Bogle

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It is with great sadness I announce the passing of Ann Bogle on February 28, 2023 after a brief illness. Ann was longtime contributor and editor of these pages and a champion of small press and emerging writers.I knew Ann since the late 1970's when she was an undergraduate…

Possible Candidates for Reading to a Crowd

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"Possible candidates for reading to a crowd" the subject line of the email to myself read. You see, writing can be hard - or writing can be easy. But writing for a crowd you'll see is something else entirely.

Shadow Walker

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Night became day and back again in the span of a heartbeat, the familiar strangeness of the sudden change stinging like dust in the eye.

Twilight of the Trotters

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Neither you nor I is old enough, of course, to remember that America’s most popular athlete once was a horse.

Escaped Poems

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Sometimes my poems escape. They crawl out through my Wi-Fi connection, I suspect.

Wild Origin

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Seeking your will, instead we found, somehow, a clutch of our own documents; folded under a rubber band gone to rot, muddy strands nestled in the creases.

Bunker

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Dressed as an English professor on Halloween I escape the red devil and run downtown. I go to the Art Car hangar I dance, I swing my golden brown briefcase

The Woman from Mecca

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We trade broken phrases of English, Arabic...

In an Unfamiliar Restaurant.

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I find myself in an unfamiliar restaurant, its cuisine an uncomfortable pastiche of Croatian, Burmese, Jamaican and leftovers of long ago Sunday dinners in a small New England town.

Queen Jane Redux

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The laptop has ruined the sanctity of the library. And so I get up and go see Queen Jane.

Rhapsody in the Rain

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so many bills to pay the list keeps shedding its skin like a snake

What I told the police the morning after

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Miracles don’t happen to the poor.

Esmeralda

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Being an uncredited bonus composition, written in the sublimest access of divine afflatus this poet believes his lyric verse has ever known. “In olden times, dark was not counted fair”: Those were the words, I think, of some old poet. …

Worry Is for the Well-Rested

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I'm in the boardroom, downtown in San Francisco. I don't even remember showing up for work today. I hope they fire me, just like they fired Bill. Well not exactly like that, that was awful. He was caught downloading a phenomenal amount of…

Skin and Bones

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She lay there, skin and bones, unable to speak. Little did we know those were our last moments togethter. How cruel for her, to want to share a lifetime of thoughts and feelings in those waning moments only to be robbed of the chance. My brother and I…

Déjà Vu Sur l’Herbe

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While watching the ever-present crowds passing by on my insides, I noticed, by accident, a man smiling who might have been me, not sure. Maybe I’m eating soap for the first time, because I am either frothing or foaming at the mouth. An

Lucky Strike

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...when they entered eager lungs hungry from deep and sweaty love

Light

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"You gonna be old before you're old," my father had told her.

Doll Parts

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She’s always had one foot on a pedestal and the other in a gutter.

Straight to Jimbo

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...coming into that bone yard, you just hang a right, go on past La Fontaine, and take a left a bit further on. Jimbo's right up in there.

Elephant with a little Poet on its Head

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“Every word was once an animal.”--Emerson This circle has been Broken. The mother has Disappeared inside the wounds Of gunfire like an Eye drop. Who knows if Any of them left, crunched Down, whole into the…

Trash Burning, 1976

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This time the bag's bigger/than the boy and the door.