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Maximum Exposure
She carefully hangs her life on the tautly stretched line across her small back yard. A sun faded floral housedress a pair of bib overalls knees worn white on the kitchen linoleum, cracked and dingy. She waits patiently for Humphrey Bogart to arrive and carry her up the river of her memory. The chicken threatens…
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FESTIVAL
They ebb and flow like tides down the half-empty street from venue to venue, many with that lost look of years in the desert, driven on by promised the land of honey notes, the mother’s milk of jazz. The event passes flap in the breeze created by their wake, some checking programs, their personal map…
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A MEETING OF THIEVES
The squirrel on the lawn stood, his little eyes boring into me as I stepped out of the front door. He threw out his chest, and I half expected him to beat on it with his forepaws, a rodent Tarzan. I, of course, had no choice but to stare back at him defiantly, making clear…
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TOZAN’S THREE BASKETS 鐵笛倒吹 四十一
Tozan said the whole of knowledge can be expressed in a single letter. Hakuun, the great Master set to writing verse. You, who hold the brush with shaking hand, what will you write in answer to Tozan. Think carefully of each stroke and imagine Joshu’s endless smile. A reflection on case 41 of the Iron…
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AMONG THE MISSING
We can sit for a time, and speak of our pains, how they cause us to stop and look inward while the world proceeds on it’s axis, in a slow march through time and space, and we share the anger and anguish of our too fallible bodies which time reclaims in slow progression. We do…
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THE LIST
I am compiling a list, ever so slowly, of places I still want to visit, and you may be surprised to find that Paris, London and Madrid are nowhere to be found. It isn’t that they lack beauty, charm and countless things to see and do, it is simply that they have been usurped by…
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BALANCE
It is a precarious balance, really, more and exercise in tottering and hearing than in standing still. Some prefer stasis, others, I included, find it leads inevitably to a loss of energy, to an entropy from which it is difficult to escape. I don’t walk along the edge of the precipice, but I do peer…
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Jack, for Heaven’s Sake
The truly pious will never get to heaven for they don’t know how to sing or dance. Kerouac roams freely like a rogue elephant unable to get a good buzz on but not for want of trying. He thought it would be Edenic, a garden somewhere between Babylon hanging and the lobby of the Royal…
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ONE OF US? NEVER!
I now live among birds, and they accept me, listen to me endless complaints, and never demand I cease kvetching. I know they speak about me behind my back, but they are kind, and generally do not remind me of my shortcomings, no doubt certain I am all too well aware of my failings, and…
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HAVING WRITTEN
I suppose I ought to be glad that no playwright has ever written about me, for that is a fame that always seems to end badly, unless it is a comedy, and that, too, is dangerous ground, for such plays tread heavily for a laugh. Consider Shakespeare, and ask yourself if yo would want to…
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