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excerPTS from “re-enGliSh, for fred ho” Northern abolitionist poems were so beautiful a slaveholder reading them over breakfast wouldn’t even lose his appetite. “Quicker to a field of blood than to a wedding.” What can reliably be said: the Roman withdrawal from Britain was complete in 407. 449 the Britons hire the Saxons as mercenaries for protection against the Picts. Among the soldiers on the three Angle, Saxon and Jute ships a soothsayer foretold they would occupy the client-country 300 years, plundering it half three hundred. Not only from the get-go— forked before the fact. Quicker to a wedding than a march against war. In his original draft Eisenhower called it the “military industrial congressional complex,” but was persuaded to remove the “congressional” attribute (though I’m not sure by whom). Quicker to a car wash than count the notes of a black-capped chickadee. The sound’s the same. Some hear “kindness,” some hear “kill” “kill.” My holy mountain is a stack of dirty dishes, daffodils. As you can see, the contrary to “peasant” is not “noble”: working poor bilker wage slave snake-in-the-grass the jobless the ignominious bohunk hornswoggler debt dupe picaroon toiler flimflammer hayseed hoodwink simpleton diddler vassal sleazebag employee double-dealer pauper swindler 226 RobeRT KociK peon shyster stagnated wage earner confidence man toiler finagler undocumented worker chisler and scumpuff Would that we were safe. So that we keep going going. So that mispronunciation is not sickness . . . Had we instead put butter on the fire to make it rain . . . Had we known. The point at which air’s itself the sauce. —Robert Kocik ...

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