1312 4 0
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New Year's Eve 1984: I was a hit with my outfit. When I walked into the house, a teenage girl looked me up and down and said, “Nice knickerbockers.” My cousins dragged me to the living room floor which was crowded with my family dancing and I started…
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1312 4 4
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This is my melody. I will not shut it down for you, it will do that all on its own. Everyone knows this. I don't need you to go on holiday. Can't really get away from yourself. This is my color guard. It goes with the everything I am. I'm not sorry I grew…
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1312 2 1
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Edmund read ultra-fast:
“.Ass - ;fuc gav fas no I will fu fuc fu her he wen fa, ha! Ha!
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1312 0 0
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Try and put my bones back in
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1312 2 2
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If she was still breathing, Tom promised himself he would let her live, but right then his shoulder ached and his right hand was throbbing.
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1312 2 1
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I remember sitting there on the first unfinished rooftop, watching you building houses out of words. You hammered in grammar and punctuation; you said these things needed to be hammered in by hand. You drove the long straight exclamation …
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1312 5 4
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We sat up in bed. It's two o'clock in the morning. Blinding circular flashlight beams probe through the half pulled shades. Magnified black silhouettes of men's torsos lumber back and forth in the yard. We are in a fishbowl and being invaded.
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1312 6 5
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He doesn't call, not even on her birthday. She doesn't mention it or complain. She knows she doesn't have it as bad as some, even in this privileged Triangle of North Carolina. She is white and pretty and belongs to what's left of the middle…
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1312 11 6
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The big wigs call it aiding and abetting. I became an left-handed accountant with a tendency to fudge numbers for the damned.
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1312 0 0
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Should probably be faster at the cash register
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1312 2 0
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My brother Herb married his high school sweetheart right after completing college. This was a girl named Beryl, whom he'd met originally in Mr. Reinert's marching band at York High School in Elmhurst. I remember one day in particular in the middle of the
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1312 4 3
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The doctor bargained with us enough but I kept saying “give it a thousand years and we'll think about it.” He seemed to mean well and be smart enough to not be feeding us snakes, but he wasn't a praying man and I couldn't see past that look he used to give my…
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1312 0 0
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It is your hamsa that protects us,” the girl whispers to me.
“Then I shall give it to you,” I reply.
“No,” she says in the unselfish innocence of her youth. “It is yours and you must keep it.” I smile and kiss her dirty forehead. Eternity passes whil
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1312 3 2
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Terry had an apartment not far from Lake Michigan, where we could stroll to one of the beaches. It was close to Lincoln Park. This was in the summer of 1966. We had to walk up to the fourth floor, and on those steamy hot Chicago summer nights in August,
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1312 2 0
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"Don't stab me with that," says John.
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1311 6 6
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The world has long since been bootlegged by madmen. The new invisible con men are the same as the old visible con men, hiding and lying behind their walls of lingering death. There's a weapon wielding demon hell bent on an insane vengeance crawling around…
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1311 5 2
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I’d made that shot a thousand mental times, and when it counted, I missed. It happens.
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1311 2 3
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1311 3 2
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The man was older and had never found a wife. Years of accumulated pain had short-circuited his instincts so that the first time he met the woman, he doubted her. Each time he spoke to her, he felt himself responding, but he wouldn't allow himself to plea
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1311 11 7
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Names are forbidden here. So is apology.
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1311 0 0
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He then spent his walk home to his single apartment spitting up various textures of red, combinations of cherry and blood mostly.
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1311 3 2
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"Sometimes things just don’t go as planned. It doesn’t mean anyone is to blame - It just is."
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1311 0 0
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I pat my pocket to make sure everything’s in order; a Starbucks blueberry scone to sustain me, a $50 Brooks Brothers gift card from my in-laws, and my “piece”–a fully-charged BlackBerry handheld device.
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1311 8 6
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I'm working through the rocky pine cones so you don't have to. I'm stepping over the little dreaming people in your dreams so we don't wake them with our loud and coming loose footprints. The poem passes by like a heartbreaking train…
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1311 3 3
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Who hasn’t at some point of the day wanted to dredge up everything in your pocket just to see what it is.
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1311 8 6
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Before Genesis, digesting the primordial soup.
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1311 4 4
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And if I lived a thousand lives...
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1311 1 0
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Wile E. Coyote? A junkie strung out on bunk dope.
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1311 14 10
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Sitting together at Starbucks, we composed a long love letter which we've been mailing back and forth to each other, signing our name upon each receipt and returning it for the last nine months and it has grown to eighty seven pages, barely fitting in a shoe box.
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1311 2 2
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My grandma kicks field goals between her bedposts, again and again. My finger is sore from holding. She says that's all I'm good for. My finger is smudged with ink from writing my poems on her paper: half-moon rowboats, clouds like whales. She twisted my finger for …
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