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They were an interesting young couple. Tom was a big man with rugged features, though not handsome. His face was deeply pock-marked with the scars that are sometimes left over from a terrible bout with adolescent acne. His wife – though I was never cert
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My dog Alfie and I would get in my van and go out at midnight for a doughnut. Or an éclair. A French cruller, to be exact. Sometimes we would get Blondie's Pizza on Telegraph Avenue near the Berkeley campus, if it got to be too lonely and restless at nigh
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A sweltering heat sits on the field like a fog failing to move. From the diamond, you were able to see the Chicago skyline poking above the apartment buildings like antennas, sending signals all throughout the world.
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I would read her stories on quiet summer days as we sat along the river, just the two of us stretched out in the tall grass, hidden in the shade of the pine trees lining the banks of the Mullica while a gentle breeze cooled our skin. She liked the way I read to…
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If you have writer’s block, it may be because your childhood wasn’t unhappy enough, but there’s nothing you can do about that now, is there?
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Still Life with Dragon Fruit and Absinthe Glass ‚ Allgegenwart ist Einsamkeit. ‘. — Johannes Jakob Hrodebertsohn …And bright inside this space, though outside lightfall? The spillaging of streetlamps does not cross the…
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I flipped a large cardboard coin
On one side it said
Abundance
But on the other side it said
Scarcity
I went to the store
And began packing everything I could get
Into my shopping cart
But the things that started spilling over
Onto the
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In the switched-off
time
of day's blackest
rest-
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It's 50/50 that you'll ever pad your knee enough to ever kneel on it.
Your back hurts, the Orthapedist labels it arthritis.
I think that means we're getting old,
so I crawl up the tower of your body
as I'm a little younger, more sprightly.
You're a
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"I don’t know what to do. I need to catch the 11:30 train, but what is the difference between doing it today or tomorrow?"
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Jim twisted the skinny trunk of his body in a fast, violent jerk just as the cop grabbed the buckle of his left Harley Davidson boot. When the boot flopped off, Jim found himself sitting upright, ready to jump up and run. But then he felt the baton lock down on his…
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In the poetry section, no one talks except to say, "excuse me," or, "wow," or, "amazing," with the second 'a' stretched out like a blacktop highway. But mostly they say, "excuse me." and that's only because someone dressed in a corduroy jacket is …
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My usual angel fell from the ceiling and onto the couch.
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…if something happened to you so horrible that you no longer felt like living, would it have been better if you had died at birth? Okay, that's probably too early. No reason to act in haste. Maybe you should die when you're eighteen years old, just before…
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“I am the Successor of Peter!” he said, supporting himself on the shepherd’s staff topped with a crucifix: “And you are trespassing on Holy Ground.” Baal said: “No ground is Holy for me.
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George didn’t move when Cindy punched him in the nose. He just stood
up and walked to the fridge, poured a glass of water and dropped a few
ice cubes into the glass. The ice cracked in the glass as he walked
back to the couch.
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“Stay away from fad fruits and vegetables like endive, pomegranates and kiwis,” his father said. “Stick with something that people need, something that will last–parsley.”
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Your left hand cups your balls which are drawn up tight under a turgid fireplug cock. Your right hovers over your temple, thumb cocked at the cheek. Your eyes are dreamy, mouth wry, chest and belly furry and fat. You're a picture in a file on my desktop on which…
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She was having a laugh, but I didn't know what about. We were sitting in a big house that was on the top of a large incline. All these books were scattered around, and the walls and the kitchen, the doors and the quarter round and every other thing, was old and…
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I ate a tuna salad sandwich for lunch.
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People speak of wordsmiths, as if they hammer text into shape; smelting down clunky prose, recasting from white-hot ink.
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The past follows, battered, bruised, always behind
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(Sung to the melody of "Ghostbusters")When your prose is weakMetaphors clichésWho you gonna callGhostwriters!Characters they speakNot much to sayWho you gonna callGhostwriters!I ain't ‘fraid of no rejectionI ain't ‘fraid of no rejectionLyin' in your bedImagination soarsWho…
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the little white lights i see
mean many different things to me
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In need of help, he bought his first self-help book at the age of twenty-nine.
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What the fuck is that smell? Puke? Pine-Sol? Oh shit!Back seat of a cop car.Again?What is it this time?“Excuse me, officer? Where the fuck are my clothes?”
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We danced the pee dance after too much Seven Up and tasted odd Jello dishes.
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