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it was the hornbill that spoke it in the nothing becoming nothing begetting nothing this is everything
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the evening empty as a convex coconut split down the seam not that it can be filled
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the evening empty as a gourd that twists on an iron thread the rough skin of the sphere
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the stars are suddenly remote candescent petals night throws above the yard the beautiful things
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red red red
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paula's paintings are real the women thick visceral like stubborn cliffs the sea cannot contain or drown
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necromancer necromancer necromancer make me a mate only one of my ribs pray take
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is that why in the photograph david plays an inflatable lyre does his smile make it all artifice
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don't try to understand what another person means by love don't even bother
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the critics will babble and frenzy forever to find the nouns she never wrote between the crowded verbs and adverbs
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he called her: the heart and the womb are similar she called him: arrow in my heart
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rose petals he picks up in the neighbor's yard end up at tuesday's feet and sprinkled through the sheets
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you need that craft the precision of measurement angles of angels who incidentally are never women
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i have to thank god i'm a woman for in these ordered days a woman only is free to be very hungry very lonely
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and makes a curse and makes a sugar of the malocclusions the inconditions of love
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when i put my finger to the hole they've cut for a dimmer switch in a wall of plaster stiffened with horsehair it seems i've scratched a two-hundred-year-old itch
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of a chain of forms infinite summed to a singular value the elegy as a place to begin
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it is a human love i live inside a bony skeleton you recognize as words or simple feeling
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but it has no feeling as the metal is hot it is not given to love
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the tour bus stops on the road's edge on the right a black town the left indian pointing he says: this is the racial divide
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yet love hums like turning forks and the fading spreading sound is the growth of something more
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the woman singing in zulu in a jamaican bar is calling down fire calling down fire there is no contradiction
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when orators advertise the american eagle's virtues the american eagle is not listening this is his virtue
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he is somewhere else he is mountains away but even if he were near he would never make an audience
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if we have honored him we have honored one who unequivocally honors himself by overlooking us
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he does not know the meaning of magnificent perhaps we do not altogether either who cannot touch him
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and we are like the blind musician at the hotel who tells us with a smile i'll see you later
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the leaf you pick from the fall rises and dips away with every ridge fingers stiff from time you trace
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in front the lead-coated horses don't seem to mind the officers droppings
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is that a gigantic molar with worms popping out such a variety of colors
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they do things like suppress that sidney poitier is the best american actor ever
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ooh he just dropped his wait a babushka her her boot's crkkkk
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make sure you never think of any other social arrangement other than one that militarily has to dominate three quarter of the world
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for a world mocked-up terms to contest
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and into timed pattern a male's mine
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work-a-day transactions transmission
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preemptive authorships as progress
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forming trends at the base asserting
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discursive bumps and grinds to report
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old belles lettres upgraded downplays gain
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regrounding the grounds (props dignity
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already sorting terms assigned to
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your wedding slides the way wiry dark hairs do down a swimming pool drain so i am drained
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sincerely i wish you every chapped bird on this pilgrimage to hold your hem up from the dust
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there are two kinds of people soldiers and women as virginia woolf said both for decoration only
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you are my stranger and see how we have closed on both ends night wets me all night blind carried
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but you really love this woman how come no one can see this everyone must become suddenly very clumsy at recognizing beauty if you are to keep her
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you don't want to lose anything at all ever you want her sex depilated you want everyone else not blind but perhaps paralyzed from the eyes down
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the other replied torn loose from the eaves the blood trembles at the lips
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till the villain left the paths of ease to walk in perilous paths and drive the just man into barren climes
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romance already open on her lap the bus laboring off into snow her good-bye kiss still startling my cheek with lipstick trace
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in the second taxi he was alone tra-la but the clock showed sixpence extra he tipped according you have left nothing behind tra-la between you
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as for the fourth taxi he was alone tra-la when he hailed it but the cabby looked so many people not to speak of the dog
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my roots are deep in southern life deeper than john brown or nat turner or robert lee i was sired and weaned in a tropic world the palm tree and banana leaf mango and coconut breadfruit and rubber trees know me
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i want the cotton fields tabacco and the cane i want to walk along with sacks of seed to drop in fallow ground restless music is in my heart and i am eager to be gone
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he cries that the magnets get stronger when he peels the pods to find no difference in the seeds of hunger and the seeds of love
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in the alembic forged her shafts and hurled at pain diseases waging a humane war greater than this achievement none i ween
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apparently the very wealthy steal
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he told her about things she could see how the dismal cover of clouds roils and explodes and the ground aches like an old woman's knee
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how wood rots against the tide good for hunting grub how to fade and fall back into the wind
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that last night they drank from the river sucked its delicate cusps of mold sang anti social songs as if they were humans
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when he flicked his handsome head to catch the drift of wind she even managed a single tear
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the metallic conductor captured her eyes she remembered how he proudly sang her name as he pranced from pole-top to kv line
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hence the delightsome gardens the dark shores the terrifying forests where nightfall enfolds a lost and tired traveler
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and what shall we make of it love perhaps what elevator is this anyway that even the prospect of going down has made you high
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is the color of emergency as i do need saving from solid things most of all their dissolve
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that was the old landscape all the new poems map the two dimensions of cartoon ducks
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see you tonight by the sovereign chartreuse ceramics at the met let's hear what you'd do differently
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for an hour i stood on two legs and ran for an hour i panted and galloped
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tomorrow mainly sunny high sunshine and just a few clouds will fill the sky breezes will turn and blow from the south ahead of a cold front approaching from canada
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she may appear to be acting in a silent film whose placards are missing in hollywood the sky is made of tin
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a witch makes her world of air then fire then the planets of cardboard then ink then a compass
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she will know things she has not seen with her eyes she will have opinions about distant cities
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the witch elm is sometimes referred to as all heart as in she was thrown into a common chest of witch elm
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the boy alexander dreams of napoleon in john c abbott's history napoleon the grand and lonely man wronged napoleon in his life wronged and in his memory wronged the boy alexander dreams of the cat alice saw the cat fading off into the dark and leaving the teeth of its cheshire smile lighting the gloom
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buffaloes blizzards way down in texas in the panhandle of texas snuggling close to new mexico these creep into alexander's dreaming by the window when his father talks with strange men about land down in deaf smith county alexander's father tells the strange men: five years ago we ran a ford out on the prairie and chased antelopes
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o loose bloom with no root no seed
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if an orchidophage's tastebud magnified resembles an orchid so my buds indubitably mimic pricking ice cream cones
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between my finger and my thumb the squat pen rests i'll dig with it
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as lightly as he touched the page before where incarnation bloomed from roots that bore the flowers i called christ's when i was four
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through the meridian's fine blue hairlines the admirals are converging in their fish-hulled ships with their frogmen and sirens and tanks with knotted chain flails that beat the ground before them as they crawl
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behind them the cities dim out on the foredeck the admirals sigh to lean from the curving bows to trail their fingertips in the water
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like compass pencils of light their fingertips spread out the nervous systems more complex than spiral nebulae orchards of mines grow up on the ocean floor
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only the grassblown norman ringmounds go on dreaming of monet picture hats and streaming scarves the bunker disguised as a picnic that went on forever
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now the cathedral at bayeux with its window and views is rolled up and the conqueror's navy on its blue worsted waves and hengist and horsa the escorial with its green shoals of ships all are safely rolled up
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carhoods streaming the fractalized shadows of chain links and sledges laden with wattles with yellowy rolls of oiled paper to seal up the windows of snowy muscovy or minsk
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i knew always that i would be a worker in the vineyard as are all men and women living at the same time whether they are aware of it or not
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but you must have hope and you must have faith if you work if you wait you will find the place where the four-leaf clovers grow
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or out with those crazy girls those teenagers laughing on a christmas shopping spree free (the only day they let us out in two months) feet wet and cold from snow
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but that dashing dauntless delphic diehard diabolic cracker likes his fiction turned with a certain elegance and wit and that anti-anti-anti-slum-congestion clublady prefers romance search through the mothballs comb the lavender and lace were her desires and struggles futile or did an innate fineness bring him at last to a prouder richer peace in a world gone somehow mad
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occasionally lifting their eyes to watch the groundsmen at their antics not just hope over experience but hope over certain knowledge it was like staying to watch your horse lose
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and yet there was some residual sense of good fortune to be there perhaps it was the fresh air or being safely out of range of conversation or the infinitesimal prospect of infinitesimal entertainment
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he wondered about the word so filled with breath yet breathless breathless breathless a full stop
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son we were oak without mouth uncut we were brave before memory
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we will blaze forth what remains as pixels
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and so it somehow had to be you did it for them you erupted out of englishness and made an exhibition of yourself
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you are a joy forever though a thing of beauty nit and from her madder eyebrows to her utmost purple swirl against all captious critics i'll defend the poster girl
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to start over in the carved moment is to take cover
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alone up a sidewalk laid down for her
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please ease of song my tongue
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