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Forgiving the Governor of South Carolina

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(Originally appeared in Fourth Genre, April 2011) The waiting room of the Rosenfeld Cancer Center in Abington, Pennsylvania is my new home away from home, and I'm eager to prove it. When I step on the ridged, black rubber welcome mat and the sliding…

A Woman Who Watches

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She was a beautiful woman. I don't argue with that. I welcome it.

The General

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Where the General is, the world is data and patterns and signatures.

Guinness for Iron

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My sister / craves raisons

Jackpot

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Lucky for mama, he doesn't like for his women to work.

If "1984" Had A More Upbeat Ending.....

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Momentarily Winston’s thoughts muddled again. He felt his fingers twitch, a physical sensation which seemed to accompany any recollection from the past. Most of his memories were moments he’d reiterated so many times during his stay in the Ministry of Lov

elegy to the death of an empire

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lol romney

You are here

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meditation and thoughts run in circles

All the Young Angel Heads

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I don't think you understand. A sad boy doesn't just die inside, slowly, he becomes withdrawn from certain types of lovely youthful reasoning out loud, accustomed to feeling what is expected, graded, just to be allowed to survive another…

Wandering the Streets of Fitzrovia

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I’m deathly afraid of the pub crawls of my ancestors, through Bohemia and Fitzrovia because of the ghosts of alcohol already etched inside my veins and the headlong loss of oxygen

Becoming an Author

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"good luck, and be assured acceptance for representation or publication is based on different criteria at different agencies and we are sure you will yet find someone mentally deficient enough to give your book a shot."

'The Good Life' Not by Bud Smith

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I'm trying to read a Poetry in Motion poem on there wall of a crowded electric train

Tuscumbia, Alabama

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My dad at the wheel, my mother's ulcer inflamed, she puked her way across northern Alabama that summer, from Huntsville and the rusting rockets to Tuscumbia, the farthest any of us had been west. We drove through raw, blistered towns,…

The Fetishist

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Sex is a fetish war -- a battle of trinkets of desire

Payout

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In the evidence of broad daylight, in the secrecy of darkness, in drizzling rain that teased the embers, Annabelle worked hard.

Small Budget Poems

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Toxins make a body happy/ as if acceleration toward// an end of consciousness/ is its own reward.

Bookends of a Life: II

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The clacking ventilator reminds me of ice cubes rattling in your highball...

Black Hole

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The falling may continue// forever.

This Is How You Make The Bed

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He disrobes; shoes, socks, shirt, belt, pants. He smells of hard work. The nude whisper of everything else.

Haze

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Just like D-Ray White’s tapping still bounces off the mountains if the right person is listening, Hasil’s hoots and howls are trapped in record wax like a blood-drunk mosquito in amber.

Introduction and Apology Written Against the End of Time

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They articulate my failings as a human being./ They articulate my greater rage at human beings// here for such a short time and at the precipice already

To See Who's There

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Able to search through centuries, I click, scribble, skim,resurrect wet stone walls, the smell of burning peat.Bob's your uncle; Peggy's your aunt.Name your family, child. My brother said helloto Uncle Shirley and Aunt Greg. I was more…

SECRETS

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they don't tell

The Reward of Work is Harder Work

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If you stop, you starve// and they just offer what you do/ to others, starved already,/ and schooled, as you, in servitude.

The Fuddy-Duddy Writer Reflects on her Fan(s)

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The Fuddy-Duddy Writer does not do wit.

Scottish Independence

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with peaty aromatics, opened,/ and a welcomed sting, swallowed,

blind

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what world is this?

Writer's Envy

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You may think you've tasted envy, but yours was just a sour sip of wine at a civilized wine-tasting. Mine is bottom-shelf, well-brand gin in a biker bar with miss-the-urinal piss stains on the floor.

Sure Thing

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If you ask me I'm thinking I'm just blowing off some steam, some hot air that doesn't add up to the old cliche of a hill of beans. A hill of fucking beans.

Exhale

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It's as if the house knew I was relinquishing my hold on it.