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DO THEY CARE?
I cannot begin to imagine what the birds that overtake our small wetland each evening must think of us. They must know we stare at them as they congregate in the last light of the departing sun. I do know they flaunt their freedom, moving through the sky at one moment gracefully, at another with…
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MURDER
It is one thing to murder your little darlings, as writers like to say, but as a poet it is wholly another thing to murder your children, those you have raised from birth on the page, tended with care hoping they might one day leave home and find their place in the world. How do…
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ALL BETS ARE ON
It is a game, of course, and one you cannot win. The question is how much will you lose if you buy into the game. The odds favor the house. There would not be a house if the odds did not favor it. But you know you must play the game. There is no other…
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ONCE TOO MANY
He remembered his mother taking him to the opera once. It was an experience he hoped never to repeat in life and, man y years on, he had been successful in not doing so again. The opera was sung in English but he felt that only made it worse, for if was was sung in…
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HERE’S LOOKING AT YOU
The mirror and I broke up this morning. We’d been together quite a while but I was tired of its refusal to show the real me and not some aged version the mirror created. The mirror, of course as it always did, said it was not at fault, but it always says that. It tried…
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COLLEGE DAYS
All these years later he still could not fathom why he had done it. It wasn’t something he had thought about doing, but one day he just did it, showed up and got the gig on the carrier current station that reached 96% of the campus. On a good day. But he liked it and…
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IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING
Of course, the cat knows what is about to happen but she will not tell us. She always knows what is about to happen, she claims. When we push her to share the information with us she says that we do not speak her language fully enough and she is tired of repeatedly trying to…
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PROTECT AND DEFEND
Today they sent me an email telling me that I need to change my password. They do this periodically, a reminder not to let others know my password. They suggest that I not keep it in a place where others might find it, that I should keep it hidden away, and they have a solution…
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NAMING
We save the height of absurdity for the naming of countries, although we do practice the absurd in naming cities and places. Except in the zoo no one has seen a Buffalo in Western New York. And there is nothing at all humorous about Yeehaw Junction Florida. But we save the best for countries. Why…
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WITH PEN AND PRAYER
It all came crashing down. That was the ending he had written, so that was how it would end. And this time he actually liked the ending which was not often the case. He could not remember a time when the ending came to him so naturally. And the ending was always the hardest part.…