Assisted Dying

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There are no barbed wires here: there are keypad numbers green lights and weathered LEDs glued half-heartedly to brick

We punch the nonsense in a thousand times we get it wrong until finally they let us in

It’s like some kind of miracle now: We are passing through purgatory thick steel turnstiles and radio controls dumb children too wise to walk away and never come back in

to modern-day senility: We laugh telling each other telling me telling them telling ourselves as we sleep that this is all we have...

Next to idiocy Even the doctors and the dinosauric bones buried in bedsores believe it: Extinction is freedom!

But it isn't extinction it's redemption from some place some vast and empty space

like my grandfather's mind like the house he built

on 203 Pine

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[jp/p] lives on the craggy shores of Maine; the misty-eyed, evergreen stretches of Washington; and the godforsaken desolate flatlands of Texas, where even grey grass is possible. They’ve been published in numerous no-name zines and dusty university anthologies. Their work is heavily distributed across defunct message boards and poetry forums. Thanks to their cagey moniker, their work is almost impossible to find because Google ignores slashes and only respects brackets for timeframes. [jp/p] doesn’t have social media, an agent, a concierge, or a hairstylist.