Spring - Edna St. Vincent Millay
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flow
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A Little Closer to the Edge - OCEAN VUONG
Young enough to believe nothing
will change them, they step, hand-in-hand,
into the bomb crater. The night full
of black teeth. His faux Rolex, weeks
from shattering against her cheek, now dims
like a miniature moon behind her hair.
In this version the snake is headless — stilled
like a cord unraveled from the lovers’ ankles.
He lifts her white cotton skirt, revealing
another hour. His hand. His hands. The syllables
inside them. O father, O foreshadow, press
into her — as the field shreds itself
with cricket cries. Show me how ruin makes a home
out of hip bones. O mother,
O minutehand, teach me
how to hold a man the way thirst
holds water. Let every river envy
our mouths. Let every kiss hit the body
like a season. Where apples thunder
the earth with red hooves. & I am your son.
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Elaine Kahn | A Voluptuous Dream During an Eclipse
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Cause and Effect - Richard Jackson
It’s because the earth continues to wobble on its axis
that we continue to stumble down the streets of the heart.
It’s because of the loneliness of the first cell trying to swim
through its primordial pool that we are filled with a kind of
galactic fear. For example: one moment a rocket falls
capriciously into a square. Another moment, a rogue wave
turns over the fishing boat whose crew leaves their memories
floating like an oil slick that never reaches shore.
In this way we understand our dying loves scratching at the door.
In this way, each love creates its own theory of pain. Each love
gnaws the derelict hours to the bone. But because there are
so many blank spaces in history we still have time
to write our own story. Wittgenstein said our words have
replaced our emotions. He never understood how
we have to cleanse ourselves of these invisible parasites
of doubt and fear. We might as well worry about
the signals from dead worlds wandering around the universe
forever. Think instead of how the trees prop up the sky.
How the rain falls into the open eyes of the pond
bringing a vision no one expected. Here’s mine: this bee
hovering over the pencil seems to bring a message from
the deepest flowers you inhabit. Because I don’t know
where all this love has come from, because the clouds are
covered with our footsteps that know no time, I am
no longer surprised when each day comes from a new place,
because in this way, I can imagine these words getting lost
in your lungs, my fingers curling inside you as if I could
gather you inside my own heart, or tracing the slope of your hip
towards a whole other world. Don’t worry. Like us the planet
wobbles because of the shifting hot and cold zones, high
and low pressures, the pull of tides. The stars that are
these words are always closer than we think despite
the theories of astronomers. In this way, I will always be there,
a rain falling into the sea, the abandoned light opening your eyes
despite the curtains of reason, the life you give each time
you turn to me, because the stumbling breaths we borrow
from each other are all we have to keep each other alive.
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Taxidermy - Sierra DeMulder
Five years after your daughter’s death,
you still cry in the juniors section of department stores.
You preserve her bedroom like a taxidermist.
Her unworn prom dress still hangs
like a skinned mermaid in her closet.
Cancer entered your home like a greedy tenant,
drew himself into family portraits,
slept in your daughter’s bed,
swallowed all her blood cells.
It started with a headache. A fever,
your daughter melting like a popsicle.
It took you a week to tell your husband
about the blood in the toilet.
Sometimes, you wonder
if you never caught it,
could you have lived
as if it was never there?
As if saying that word instantly
drapes a shroud over your house.
Would it still have slept
like cremation in her bed?
The doctors spoke to you in time lines,
as your daughter’s weight dropped like a count down,
a surprise party no one wanted to throw.
Once, when she was in the other room,
her blood being read like tea leaves,
the doctor suggested not to bother with college applications.
You couldn’t bring yourself to tell her.
You couldn’t bring yourself to say it.
Sometimes you think she knew,
as she methodically filled out each question and box,
it was never for her.
There is still a stack of unsent applications
hidden like tumor in your dresser.
She kissed every envelope goodbye.
You couldn’t bear to send more of her away.
When she passed,
quietly like a note to God,
all you wanted was to swaddle her
in your arms like an infant, bring her home
from the hospital, fragile and new.
Breastfeed her back to life,
potty train and finger paint,
reteach her the alphabet,
retrace her first steps
back to you.
To lose a child is like giving birth in reverse.
It is slow and it rips, planting a permanent lump
in your throat.
When chemotherapy pulled out
the last of her hair, you started carrying
her baby teeth in your pocket: A reminder
things can grow back.
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The Ninth Elegy - Rainer Maria Rilke
Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)–: why then
have to be human–and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate?…
Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.
Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which
would exist in the laurel too…..
But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.
And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it,
trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands,
in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart.
Trying to become it.– Whom can we give it to? We would
hold onto it all, forever… Ah, but what can we take along
into that other realm? Not the act of looking,
which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.
The sufferings, then. And above all, the heaviness,
and long experience of love,–just what is wholly
unsayable. But later, among the stars,
what good is it–thay are better as they are: unsayable.
For when the traveler returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley,
he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead
some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue
gentian. Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window–
at most: column, tower….But to say them, you must understand,
oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves
ever dreamed of existing. Isn’t the secret intent
of this taciturn earth, when it forces lovers together,
that inside their boundless emotion all things may shudder with joy?
Threshold: what it means for two lovers
to be wearing down, imperceptibly, the ancient threshold of their door–
they too, after the many who came before them
and before those to come…., lightly.
Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland.
Speak and bear witness. More than ever
the Things that we might experience are vanishing, for
what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act.
An act under a shell, which easily cracks open as soon as
the business inside outgrows it and seeks new limits.
Between the hammers our heart
endures, just as the tongue does
between the teeth and, despite that,
still is able to praise.
Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,
you can’t impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe
where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him
something simple which, formed over generations,
lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze.
Tell him of Things. he will stand astonished; as you stood
by the rope-maker in Rome or the potter along the Nile.
Show him how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours,
how even lamenting grief purely decides to take form,
serves as a thing, or dies into a Thing–, and blissfully
escapes far beyond the violin.–And these Things,
which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient,
they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all.
They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart,
within–oh endlessly–within us! Whoever we may be at last.
Earth, isn’t this what you want: to arise within us,
invisible? Isn’t it your dream
to be wholly invisible someday?–O Earth: invisible!
What, if not transformation, is your urgent command?
Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you no longer
need your springtimes to win me over–one of them,
ah, even one, is already too much for my blood.
Unspeakably I have belonged to you, from the first.
You were always right, and your holiest inspiration
is our intimate companion, Death.
Look, i am living. On what? neither childhood nor future
grows any smaller…..Superabundant being
wells up in my heart.
translated by Stephen Mitchell
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Desire - Mary Mackey
in my dreams
I hold my lovers
next to me all at once
and ask them
what was it I desired?
my hands are full
of their heads
like bunches of cut roses
blond hair, brown hair, red, black,
their eyes are pools of bewilderment
staring up at me
from the bouquet
what was it I desired?
I ask again
was it your bodies?
did I hope by draping
your flesh over me
I could escape
boredom
loneliness
gray hairs shooting
towards me
from the future
like thin arrows?
did I think I could escape,
by taking your breath
into my mouth,
did I think I could escape
the responsibility
of breathing?
what did I desire in you?
sex
knowledge?
power?
love?
did I expect the clouds to
crack
and blue moths to fly out of the stars?
did I expect a voice
to call to me
saying
“Here at last is the answer.”
what
I yell at them
shaking my lovers
what did I desire in you?
their ears fall off like petals
they shed their faces
in a pile at my feet
their bewildered eyes
pucker and close
centers of fallen flowers
the last face
floats down
circling in the darkness
at my feet
what did I desire in you? I whisper
the stems of their bodies
dry in my hands
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Ellen West - Frank Bidart
I love sweets,—
heaven
would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream ...
But my true self
is thin, all profile
and effortless gestures, the sort of blond
elegant girl whose
body is the image of her soul.
—My doctors tell me I must give up
this ideal;
but I
WILL NOT ... cannot.
Only to my husband I’m not simply a “case.”
But he is a fool. He married
meat, and thought it was a wife.
. . .
Why am I a girl?
I ask my doctors, and they tell me they
don’t know, that it is just “given.”
But it has such
implications—;
and sometimes,
I even feel like a girl.
. . .
Now, at the beginning of Ellen’s thirty-second year, her physical condition has deteriorated still further. Her use of laxatives increases beyond measure. Every evening she takes sixty to seventy tablets of a laxative, with the result that she suffers tortured vomiting at night and violent diarrhea by day, often accompanied by a weakness of the heart. She has thinned down to a skeleton, and weighs only 92 pounds.
. . .
About five years ago, I was in a restaurant,
eating alone
with a book. I was
not married, and often did that ...
—I’d turn down
dinner invitations, so I could eat alone;
I’d allow myself two pieces of bread, with
butter, at the beginning, and three scoops of
vanilla ice cream, at the end,—
sitting there alone
with a book, both in the book
and out of it, waited on, idly
watching people,—
when an attractive young man
and woman, both elegantly dressed,
sat next to me.
She was beautiful—;
with sharp, clear features, a good
bone structure—;
if she took her make-up off
in front of you, rubbing cold cream
again and again across her skin, she still would be
beautiful—
more beautiful.
And he,—
I couldn’t remember when I had seen a man
so attractive. I didn’t know why. He was almost
a male version
of her,—
I had the sudden, mad notion that I
wanted to be his lover ...
—Were they married?
were they lovers?
They didn’t wear wedding rings.
Their behavior was circumspect. They discussed
politics. They didn’t touch ...
—How could I discover?
Then, when the first course
arrived, I noticed the way
each held his fork out for the other
to taste what he had ordered ...
They did this
again and again, with pleased looks, indulgent
smiles, for each course,
more than once for each dish—;
much too much for just friends ...
—Their behavior somehow sickened me;
the way each gladly
put the food the other had offered into his mouth—;
I knew what they were. I knew they slept together.
An immense depression came over me ...
—I knew I could never
with such ease allow another to put food into my mouth:
happily myself put food into another’s mouth—;
I knew that to become a wife I would have to give up my ideal.
. . .
Even as a child,
I saw that the “natural” process of aging
is for one’s middle to thicken—
one’s skin to blotch;
as happened to my mother.
And her mother.
I loathed “Nature.”
At twelve, pancakes
became the most terrible thought there is ...
I shall defeat “Nature.”
In the hospital, when they
weigh me, I wear weights secretly sewn into my belt.
. . .
January 16. The patient is allowed to eat in her room, but comes readily with her husband to afternoon coffee. Previously she had stoutly resisted this on the ground that she did not really eat but devoured like a wild animal. This she demonstrated with utmost realism.... Her physical examination showed nothing striking. Salivary glands are markedly enlarged on both sides.
January 21. Has been reading Faust again. In her diary, writes that art is the “mutual permeation” of the “world of the body” and the “world of the spirit” Says that her own poems are “hospital poems ... weak—without skill or perseverance; only managing to beat their wings softly.”
February 8. Agitation, quickly subsided again. Has attached herself to an elegant, very thin female patient. Homo-erotic component strikingly evident.
February 15. Vexation, and torment. Says that her mind forces her always to think of eating. Feels herself degraded by this. Has entirely, for the first time in years, stopped writing poetry.
. . .
Callas is my favorite singer, but I’ve only
seen her once—;
I’ve never forgotten that night ...
—It was in Tosca, she had long before
lost weight, her voice
had been, for years,
deteriorating, half itself ...
When her career began, of course, she was fat,
enormous—; in the early photographs,
sometimes I almost don’t recognize her ...
The voice too then was enormous—
healthy; robust; subtle; but capable of
crude effects, even vulgar,
almost out of
high spirits, too much health ...
But soon she felt that she must lose weight,—
that all she was trying to express
was obliterated by her body,
buried in flesh—;
abruptly, within
four months, she lost at least sixty pounds ...
—The gossip in Milan was that Callas
had swallowed a tapeworm.
But of course she hadn’t.
The tapeworm
was her soul ...
—How her soul, uncompromising,
insatiable,
must have loved eating the flesh from her bones,
revealing this extraordinarily
mercurial; fragile; masterly creature ...
—But irresistibly, nothing
stopped there; the huge voice
also began to change: at first, it simply diminished
in volume, in size,
then the top notes became
shrill, unreliable—at last,
usually not there at all ...
—No one knows why. Perhaps her mind,
ravenous, still insatiable, sensed
that to struggle with the shreds of a voice
must make her artistry subtler, more refined,
more capable of expressing humiliation,
rage, betrayal ...
—Perhaps the opposite. Perhaps her spirit
loathed the unending struggle
to embody itself, to manifest itself, on a stage whose
mechanics, and suffocating customs,
seemed expressly designed to annihilate spirit ...
—I know that in Tosca, in the second act,
when, humiliated, hounded by Scarpia,
she sang Vissi d’arte
—“I lived for art”—
and in torment, bewilderment, at the end she asks,
with a voice reaching
harrowingly for the notes,
“Art has repaid me LIKE THIS?”
I felt I was watching
autobiography—
an art; skill;
virtuosity
miles distant from the usual soprano’s
athleticism,—
the usual musician’s dream
of virtuosity without content ...
—I wonder what she feels, now,
listening to her recordings.
For they have already, within a few years,
begun to date ...
Whatever they express
they express through the style of a decade
and a half—;
a style she helped create ...
—She must know that now
she probably would not do a trill in
exactly that way,—
that the whole sound, atmosphere,
dramaturgy of her recordings
have just slightly become those of the past ...
—Is it bitter? Does her soul
tell her
that she was an idiot ever to think
anything
material wholly could satisfy? ...
—Perhaps it says: The only way
to escape
the History of Styles
is not to have a body.
. . .
When I open my eyes in the morning, my great
mystery
stands before me ...
—I know that I am intelligent; therefore
the inability not to fear food
day-and-night; this unending hunger
ten minutes after I have eaten ...
a childish
dread of eating; hunger which can have no cause,—
half my mind says that all this
is demeaning ...
Bread
for days on end
drives all real thought from my brain ...
—Then I think, No. The ideal of being thin
conceals the ideal
not to have a body—;
which is NOT trivial ...
This wish seems now as much a “given” of my existence
as the intolerable
fact that I am dark-complexioned; big-boned;
and once weighed
one hundred and sixty-five pounds ...
—But then I think, No. That’s too simple,—
without a body, who can
know himself at all?
Only by
acting; choosing; rejecting; have I
made myself—
discovered who and what Ellen can be ...
—But then again I think, NO. This I is anterior
to name; gender; action;
fashion;
MATTER ITSELF,—
... trying to stop my hunger with FOOD
is like trying to appease thirst
with ink.
. . .
March 30. Result of the consultation: Both gentlemen agree completely with my prognosis and doubt any therapeutic usefulness of commitment even more emphatically than I. All three of us are agreed that it is not a case of obsessional neurosis and not one of manic-depressive psychosis, and that no definitely reliable therapy is possible. We therefore resolved to give in to the patient’s demand for discharge.
. . .
The train-ride yesterday
was far worse than I expected ...
In our compartment
were ordinary people: a student;
a woman; her child;—
they had ordinary bodies, pleasant faces;
but I thought
I was surrounded by creatures
with the pathetic, desperate
desire to be not what they were:—
the student was short,
and carried his body as if forcing
it to be taller—;
the woman showed her gums when she smiled,
and often held her
hand up to hide them—;
the child
seemed to cry simply because it was
small; a dwarf, and helpless ...
—I was hungry. I had insisted that my husband
not bring food ...
After about thirty minutes, the woman
peeled an orange
to quiet the child. She put a section
into its mouth—;
immediately it spit it out.
The piece fell to the floor.
—She pushed it with her foot through the dirt
toward me
several inches.
My husband saw me staring
down at the piece ...
—I didn’t move; how I wanted
to reach out,
and as if invisible
shove it in my mouth—;
my body
became rigid. As I stared at him,
I could see him staring
at me,—
then he looked at the student—; at the woman—; then
back to me ...
I didn’t move.
—At last, he bent down, and
casually
threw it out the window.
He looked away.
—I got up to leave the compartment, then
saw his face,—
his eyes
were red;
and I saw
—I’m sure I saw—
disappointment.
. . .
On the third day of being home she is as if transformed. At breakfast she eats butter and sugar, at noon she eats so much that—for the first time in thirteen years!—she is satisfied by her food and gets really full. At afternoon coffee she eats chocolate creams and Easter eggs. She takes a walk with her husband, reads poems, listens to recordings, is in a positively festive mood, and all heaviness seems to have fallen away from her. She writes letters, the last one a letter to the fellow patient here to whom she had become so attached. In the evening she takes a lethal dose of poison, and on the following morning she is dead. “She looked as she had never looked in life—calm and happy and peaceful.”
. . .
Dearest.—I remember how
at eighteen,
on hikes with friends, when
they rested, sitting down to joke or talk,
I circled
around them, afraid to hike ahead alone,
yet afraid to rest
when I was not yet truly thin.
You and, yes, my husband,—
you and he
have by degrees drawn me within the circle;
forced me to sit down at last on the ground.
I am grateful.
But something in me refuses it.
—How eager I have been
to compromise, to kill this refuser,—
but each compromise, each attempt
to poison an ideal
which often seemed to me sterile and unreal,
heightens my hunger.
I am crippled. I disappoint you.
Will you greet with anger, or
happiness,
the news which might well reach you
before this letter?
Your Ellen.
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from “The Seismographic Ear” - Laurence Wieder
From transmitter to receiver, from dusk to dark.
Plucked, the string vibrates about a single line
Tending rest and motion, an attempt to hold them both
At once, and likewise inspiration seizes on
Two states and makes them one, holds them
Together in a dream of union, just like Lincoln
Until the vibrations come too intense and
A thin glass shatters in the dining room.
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The Lay Brother - Robert Huff
Francesco’s fingers must have had their say
About the blessed living near the Word
With waxen doll or with a beating bird,
While heavy oxen kept the cold away.
But here Duns Scotus’ bells shoulder the rain.
Chill incantation keeps a chilly choir.
Waiting for snowy birds, I dream of fire:
Poor devils tell me folds could not contain.
The ragged beggars dancing in the wild
Till hooded voices hobbled in dark frocks
Praised them into our tidy looking flocks.
I would not dream so. When I was a child
My father sent me scampering after strays.
In lambing season we worked through the night
Within our dancing fire’s ring of light,
FOr there were many lambs to touch those days.
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Billy the Kid - Jack Spicer
I.
The radio that told me about the death of Billy The Kid
(And the day, a hot summer day, with birds in the sky)
Let us fake out a frontier -- a poem somebody could hide in with a sheriff's posse after him -- a thousand miles of it if it is necessary for him to go a thousand miles -- a poem with no hard corners, no houses to get lost in, no underwebbing of customary magic, no New York Jew salesmen of amethyst pajamas, only a place where Billy The Kid can hide when he shoots people.
Torture gardens and scenic railways. The radio
That told me about the death of Billy The Kid
The day a hot summer day. The roads dusty in the summer. The roads going somewhere. You can almost see where they are going beyond the dark purple of the horizon. Not even the birds know where they are going.
The poem. In all that distance who could recognize his face.
II.
A sprinkling of gold leaf looking like hell flowers
A flat piece of wrapping paper, already wrinkled, but wrinkled
again by hand, smoothed into shape by an electric iron
A painting
Which told me about the death of Billy The Kid.
Collage a binding together
Of the real
Which flat colors
Tell us what heroes
really come by.
No, it is not a collage. Hell flowers
Fall from the hands of heroes
fall from all our hands
flat
As if we were not ever able quite to include them.
His gun
does not shoot real bullets
his death
Being done is unimportant.
Being done
In those flat colors
Not a collage
A binding together, a
Memory.
III.
There was nothing at the edge of the river
But dry grass and cotton candy.
"Alias," I said to him. "Alias,
Somebody there makes us want to drink the river
Somebody wants to thirst us."
"Kid," he said. "No river
Wants to trap men. There ain't no malice in it. Try
To understand."
We stood there by that little river and Alias took off his shirt
and I took off my shirt
I was never real. Alias was never real.
Or that big cotton tree or the ground.
Or the little river.
IV.
What I mean is
I
Will tell you about the pain
It was a long pain
About as wide as a curtain
But long
As the great outdoors
Stig-
mata
Three bullet holes in the groin
One in the head
dancing
Right below the left eyebrow
What I mean is I
Will tell you about his
Pain.
V.
Billy The Kid in a field of poplars with just one touch of moonlight
His shadow is carefully
distinguished from all of their shadows
Delicate
as perception is
No one will get his gun or obliterate
Their shadows
VI.
The gun
A false clue
Nothing can kill
Anybody.
Not a poem or a fat penis. Bang,
Bang, bang. A false
Clue.
Nor immortality either (though why immortality should occur to
me with somebody who was as mortal as Billy The Kid or
his gun which is now rusted in some rubbish heap or shined
up properly in some New York museum) A
False clue
Nothing
Can kill anybody. Your guy, Billy,
And your fresh
Face.
VII.
Grasshoppers swarm through the desert.
Within the desert
There are only grasshoppers.
Lady
Of Guadalupe
Make my sight clear
Make my breath pure
Make my strong arm stronger and my fingers tight.
Lady of Guadalupe, lover
Of many make
Me avenge
Them.
VIII.
Back where poetry is Our Lady
Watches each motion when the players take the cards
From the deck.
The Ten of Diamonds. The Jack of Spades. The Queen
of Clubs. The King of Hearts. The Ace
God gave us when he put us alive writing poetry for unsuspecting
people or shooting them with guns.
Our Lady
Stands as a kind of dancing partner for the memory.
Will you dance, Our Lady,
Dead and unexpected?
Billy wants you to dance
Billy
Will shoot the heels off your shoes if you don't dance
Billy
Being dead also wants
Fun.
IX.
So the heart breaks
Into small shadows
Almost so random
They are meaningless
Like a diamond
Has at the center of it a diamond
Or a rock
Rock.
Being afraid
Love asks its bare question--
I can no more remember
What brought me here
Than bone answers bone in the arm
Or shadow sees shadow--
Deathward we ride in the boat
Like someone canoeing
In a small lake
Where at either end
There are nothing but pine-branches--
Deathward we ride in the boat
Broken-hearted or broken-bodied
The choice is real. The diamond. I
Ask it.
X.
Billy The Kid
I love you
Billy The Kid
I back anything you say
And there was the desert
And the mouth of the river
Billy The Kid
(In spite of your death notices)
There is honey in the groin
Billy
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