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Double Blind – by PILCROW

January 31, 2010

To love myself, I must love the different and unknown.
We are close as strangers; I don’t know you when you laugh, or droop, or weep, or sing, or sin, or how you keep when I am gone, or where you go when I return. What stone tower, smooth and white and unadorned is this that [...]

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Rock Garden — by PILCROW

January 27, 2010

“Some water would be very pleasant,” she said, and then sang, as they lifted her out of the ground, “God is good; do not fear death! God is good!”
Did angels visit her before she was rescued by angels?
Could I sing “God is good” after eight days pinned on my own mutilated hand under eight stories [...]

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Curio Nimbus — by PILCROW

November 12, 2009

“The right reading for this is the one I’m giving it.”
Orson Welles

Draw God’s navel, [...]

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Tell Me What To Tell Them — by PILCROW

August 10, 2009

Manage expectations
Modify desires
Moribund religion
Smoke to veil the fires
“I think this is probably the hardest thing to deal with,” he said,
and then, “whatever you choose, just make sure you are true to yourself –“
“that’s all that matters.”
Holding hands affirmed a life
Time wondering,
Watching, waiting, wanting,
Trued all the jarring angles
Even though my arms are long, and his are [...]

Filed under: biography, love, pilcrow, poetry | Comments (3)

Easter Song — by SQUID

June 16, 2009

[audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/Easter_Song.mp3]
Where’d your gardener go?
Has he left you lone?
Clouds began to show,
He packed up for home
Snowflakes fall
Snowflakes fall
Raise your tender shoots,
Now the winter’s gone
Beat back to your roots,
Your first bloom withdrawn
Rise once more!
Rise once more!
Slow at first to
Show your green and
Glow, your roots must
Grow deeper still
Till you press yourself against the rock;
Your thousand fibrous fingers lock
A [...]

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Burn the Book — by PILCROW

May 6, 2009

Burn The Book
I.
In a box, among the papers I have collected and forgotten,
Bound in a white jacket, with a cut and glued spine,
Are the pages that shamed my youth.
The text says:
We are not in our control and never will be;
God hears our cries but will not apprehend or change our hearts;
There’s nothing else that we [...]

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A breaking axis of the world — by PILCROW

September 30, 2008

Someday, old and baggy-sad
I’ll slip on air,
land on earth,
shatter shoulder, hip or pelvis,
plant my bones and sprout a stone above the ground
Or I will wear so thin and slight that light
will fade me out completely
I will then address all shades and spots as
brothers, nieces, long-dead mothers
All things old and treasured,
patterned silver, china, linens
doctors, deacons, soldiers, [...]

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Wake — by SQUID

June 17, 2008

[audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/Wake.mp3]
I wake–it seems I had fallen asleep
On watch at the top of the hill.
I think how as the sun has set,
I’ve lost my own shadow in the Earth’s.
The day has moved it’s face
To look upon the fires far away.
From there, the last of the news that we heard
Came as rustling of the trees in the [...]

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Adrift — by SQUID

June 5, 2008

[audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/Adrift.mp3]
(Give us a listen, do)
When I was a little kid
Riding in the car,
Sometimes I’d look to see
No hands upon the wheel.
No parent in the seat,
Nobody to slow it down,
Strapped too tight
To reach up front
And take the wheel–
I hope we stay on the road.
On my first day of class
I opened my front door.
Southbound birds and falling [...]

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Gravity — by ACHETÉ

June 3, 2008

Gravity is the security tether
That lets you let go of the grass
And gaze open-handed into the abyss
Of sun, moon, stars, and empty space.
Gravity is the shifting illusion
That says, of the wandering zenith,
“There! There is up and not down!”
And masks, with unfathomable
But green-blanketed mass,
The vast co-wandering nadir.
Tell me, daughter of Eve:
How does it feel to [...]

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