We fought unbelievers like madmen.
We slaughtered them in their millions.
And you know we'll do it again.
Next time, we'll massacre billions -

entire nations, city by city,
province by province, region by region.
All without a care, without pity.
For we are numberless, we are legion;

we, who murder in God's holy name,
whose work is righteous, whose word is true,
we have made of death...

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I swear to you now: each word's taste matters
in ways everyone can share. All the rest
is window dressing. Just as light scatters,
sparkle and shard, we're at our level best

when we favour language. Catch a couple
lightly, roll them around your tongue, savour them.
Don't they have bite and texture? They're supple,
they nourish us. Narratives flavour them,

pepper and salt them with unde...

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Lightning! With starbright, blinding fire
it strikes across the roiling sky
like daemons surging forth in ire,
their warlike tongues a restive choir
invested with a tortured cry

that shakes the gods loose from their thrones
and hurls them down to earth like meat,
no longer pinioned to bones
which clack and rattle like small stones
upon the ground around our feet.

A rage of air and la...

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Eventide, at the waning of the sun:
the scribe is done, all-but, save the index
and the binding. How well the tale's been told -
the endless ennui; the agonies; fun
and frolics in their turn (for even sex
had left its mark, some warmth to ease the bold,

chaotic passage of each turbid year) -
and now, as cramp-wracked fingers loose the pen
he settles back, unkinks hunched shoulder blades
...

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In folly, i frown, i'm still drawn to write
and must needs put pen to paper, despite
the crushing gravity of failure. Quite
why it's so, i perplexedly don't know.

It's killing me, an execution slow
and brutal. Each poor showing lands a blow
that sweeps my breath away; each time, i grow
more needful of the urge to stop. The speed

each blow falls with makes my bruising heart bleed.
What...

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We held ourselves close in the stuttering cold
as, from somewhere away over the rooftops
two dogs debated which was the colder,
and a few streets to our right a flare went up,
its parabola of stark, saturated light
redundant in the snowblind, starched evening.

You laughed at nothing, baring
teeth like off-kilter tombstones
to the assembled throng, while
behind us somebody
hacked up a m...

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We met, rich in our finery, bedecked
in the sumptuous rituals of time;
our measured movements proved us past our prime,
precision-practiced, severe and correct,

rehearsed, perhaps, as for a hackneyed play.
We drank each other in, assessing scents,
hues of wardrobe, slant of gait, testing sense
against sense, judging age in disarray,

contrasting how each seemed with what we knew,
or fe...

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May I - do I dare to ask? -
leave my toothbrush at your house?
It wouldn't take up much room.
I know it would look so good
there in the glass, next to yours.
I think they'd hold hands and kiss
in the dark, while the world slept.

M. Peacock 14225

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Can you imagine the heat of a star?
The eyes that meet across a crowded bar?
What you hope will happen to who you are?

The journey of a heart in seconds flat
can take you unbidden from where you're at
and expose you to some strange habitat

where you feel reborn, breath swept clean away,
where long lost emotions come forth to play,
where you're in love. What a beautiful day!

M. Peaco...

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We sour, in the throes of some disaster
of our own demoralised unmaking,
abjectly pining for lord and master,
with crown, throne and sceptre for the taking

if they would but lead us to salvation
and make us strong again. We want the myth,
we crave security for our nation,
the ruthless rule of law they'd hold us with;

we'd sell our freedom cheaply for the chance
to pretend that our wor...

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