1385 6 4
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when you betrayed the vain ambition of my death,/I did not complain.
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138540
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But that last night in Europe, getting ready to fly out of Amsterdam back to the States, I heard this Phil Collins song, “In the Air Tonight,” which expressed some of the turmoil and confusion and whole-life hysteria I was feeling inside. Waves of fru
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13851410
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138521
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The woman leapt from the top of the burning building. The flames reddened the faces of the watching crowd. The heat pushed them back. The woman hit the ground. The crowd oooooed. If only I'd been a firewoman, I thought, with a ladder as tall as a building and a…
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138565
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Anneliese inserted one of her crystal drops in Hymen's left ear and kept her left earring in. For a quarter, she bought a handful of cashews and plopped them on a red napkin.
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138421
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“He didn’t finish ‘The Witchcraft of Salem Village,’” Scooter says, tattling on his little brother. I’m projecting him to be a first-round draft pick by the National Security Agency in about ten years.
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138432
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The shadows hang fast on the downs this day: And I hang like the darkness, over heath and down; Since the air there is clearer than the clouds, men say, And I'm lost in the country, I shall turn to town. If the heather is restless, then the fete is …
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138422
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I had the idea while I was in the county jail. I would get jail glasses; I wouldn’t be me; I’d be some other person. I could pretend that it was someone else rotting away in that 8x12 cell.
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138433
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The man who put up the clothes line left his kids upstairs at night and came down to my bed.
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138432
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It had been over three months since he’d left his home and started to walk. He’d kept a journal to begin with, but his book soon ran out of batteries. It was that sort of thing that had irked Neil at the start, but now he’d just let it slide down his back
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1384116
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Unless they leave you comatose,/
it’s the disasters you remember.
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138499
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How many exceptional people/
does it take to change a light bulb?
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138443
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Cliffs are not all I've known, but I've seen them every day since I came to light. When I first broke out of the shell that protected me from feet and poisons, I pushed my way into darkness. It was soil. I could not have survived if it was light, and when I surfaced there…
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138421
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Here and there a few bits of beauty, with the highest respect, reverence, erect with pride. Almost twice a thousand dawns, ten thousand in intimacy, the breasts, the nipples, means of the world to nourish itself, by the intimate bay.
It's almost pun
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138444
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Once upon a time I sat in summer chairs beside cool vine walls. This was in a borough east of the major city, where families gathered in seasonal joy, by blooms fragrant, to worship the summer and its might. There is nothing diminutive about the world when one is…
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1384106
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The face had become a chilling death mask.
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138410
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As the 5 train gained momentum away from Fulton Street, Helen took her seat with the alertness and suspicion of someone who had spent the day negotiating prices with dirty fishmongers.
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138420
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You don't just hear the sound, you are the sound, you and everyone else in the room.
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138421
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Ben was cheered to see Monique in good spirits again.
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138421
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138422
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I gave my trumpet case to a girl named Sophie; she liked the velvet inside.She still played with dolls;they would live there,in the dark away from the world.Safe. I was a terrible trumpeter;i missed the high notes in band, squawked like a chicken.I strapped the trumpeton my…
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138441
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We'd been talking about the baby, about what we would do, when the women began fighting after the wedding held in the church next to our apartment. Their fierce and piercing arguments crawled up the walls to the second story window we sat next to. We'd looked outside…
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138400
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He stood sopping in front of the mirror, dripping onto the limp puddle of clothing on the floor. He needed a haircut. He needed a shave. He needed to get rid of the two-fucking-inch white hair inside the helix of his right ear. He plucked it—and all the h
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138454
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Johnny K. didn't much like taking his exotic drugs any more. He now thought that the common reality was already an intense enough trip without wrapping it all up in enough gauze to cause permanent daydreams to the head. He liked his cheap hamburgers…
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138433
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I'm a heathen in the church of the absolute.
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138400
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A subway train rumbled through the underground and she actually felt it slither under her feet. Her gaze lingered for a moment on the desiccated leaves and the small rectangle of blue cardboard the blustery wind had wedged between the gargoyle's talons.
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138331
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She seizes my hand. I resist just enough to sense her strength.
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138333
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Now I hear a woman's voice. It sounds familiar, like I know her, but in my daze it is slightly distorted, like I am underwater and she is calling to me beneath the waves. She tells me not to be afraid. Her words are calming; they soothe away the panic and confusion. I…
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138376
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The outside world will intrude . . .
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138333
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Once in a while I have the time of my life /
in this god-forsaken Earth:
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