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Forbidden Music

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

headaches not worth having

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this is one of those "there are two kinds of people" sort of things.

Puppet X, 1

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I know you, ladies and gentlemen We see the near future through you Your factual face as you sit indoors Youthless In your ordinary chair

PASSING CUSTOMS

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What Mohammed didn’t tell me was the house was owned by drug dealers and inhabited by wealthy playboys who urged me over and over again to accompany them to the bathhouse.

After the Shark

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each to his / secret dream of the thing

Cousin (from The New Yorker)

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...to know something people around you don’t know can put you outside of them. And then you can’t get back in...

Faceless

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The sting of a slap will be remembered, as will sex, or at least a fragment of it, such as the face of a man in your room who tied your hands with the belt of your plush terry bathrobe.

Plum-Woman

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"...when my daddy found out about Jasper, it was too late— mama was already round-&-radiant with Jasper's child. "

Letters from the Asylum (3)

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She stepped into a pair of high heeled slippers and began to dance. She was Salome, a witch, dancing like the most beautiful, the most skilled whores of Paris.

Crescent City, Spring '97

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It takes almost an hour before I drift to sleep on the bus. When I wake up in Crescent City, I’m surprised. Maybe I was going somewhere else in my sleep. Walking out of the station, it feels like a strange place. Somewhere I’ve never been before. The

Music That Tastes Like Blood

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It is your music that makes me want to crack open my ribcage and rip out my heart as it still beats, to cauterize my carotids, and shove the mechanical insides of a clock into my thoracic cavity.

Leda and the Swan: Paul Gauguin

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Leda looks back over her shoulder at us as the swan grips her from behind while at the same time nipping at the nape of her neck. She's a freckled child and a little frightened. There's a dark smudge beneath her eye where the shadow runs. The swan

The Warden

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But others maintained that Billy Navins was a mad dog that needed to be put down and were just as glad that Lester was around to do it. " Call it a mercy killing," someone said. " Put the poor bastard out of his misery, didn't he ?"

Dear Plant Life Magazine

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I have enclosed a newspaper clipping so you can see I’m telling the truth. I’m in the picture on the far right, standing near a maple tree with my mouth wide open in a scream. On the far left is a rearing horse with one of the local farm kids on it,

the global obscenity of your monthly $100 coffee habit [revised]

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My sixth grade teacher used to tell us all the time about how being poor is nowhere near the same as liv­ing in poverty.

My Drifter Doppelganger

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Looming ahead was another polite suburban party at which, after a couple of pops, I'd say something that embarrasses my wife in front of her girlfriends. Or so she claims.

Shining Against Each Other

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They keep shining against each other

The first sense of desire

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I want to own you, even if it is only for a few moments or a few hours, but it will not be worth it unless for that brief span of time I know that the only purpose of your existence is to be a woman whom I own.

Tongue / Giddy

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A delicate thrill buzzed my face.

Secrets; Opening to "Woolgathering"

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Some of us, however, turn our secrets over in our souls, churning them with the fury of the howling winds of a January night. They are eroded and shaped and fine-tuned with the precision of a jeweler; the deeper and darker they are, the more brilliant of

Amanda Palmer

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Amanda Palmer's explaining the eyebrow thing. An altercation with someone at Roadrunner, or maybe old boyfriend shit to burn— She's animated but he's losing signal, filling in the blanks himself. Whatever, it won't light at first, and then WHUMP and she…

One Thousand Incarnations and One Thousand Deaths - Part II

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The door flew open, hitting the wall, and the woman seated in the corner across from her pressed herself against the bench. Loretta saw that down through her petticoats came a trickle of yellow liquid, which pooled on the floor.

Easy Rider

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She stood there with her back to me and her dress around her ankles.

Four Haikus

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The crow in darkness;visual palpitationsunder the street lamp. In the dark morningmy car disrupts the still cold;a blister on earth.Never mind the cat.The Japanese Peace Lillywill steal your last breath.The blacktop highway;a rough scab to cover thedeep man-cut…

Morir Soñando

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While Erik rubs my back, I fall asleep. I'm not lying on my bed in Florida - I'm face down on the pavement outside Brooklyn Pharmacy. And it's not Erik's hand smoothing oil of cassis into my skin, but that Officer Green's meaty one gripping me . . .

Skinny in her Black Dress

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black hair/ (damp) around her ears Keys on the table Drinking coffee from a glass

An Admirer Visits Paul Bowles

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I dropped out of college and flipped a coin, a 1929 half-dollar, and decided if heads, suicide. If tails, a life of perpetual travel.

The Nightly Dance

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The electricity animates my body into myclonic dance. I do not rest. I dance with the demons; I dance with Nijinsky rage. I dance with the fury of Saint Vitus and his wooden cross. My shoes are fashioned with my own fear, tanned and stretched over my feet

A Selection From Einstein's Letters

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My dear Papa: I don't care to join you on holiday. Last summer when I came you and Frau Himmelfarb played "Wildlife Management" so late into the night that I got no rest.

We All Fall Down

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I didn’t give her enough skin. The world will always hurt her.