Let This Year Be

The Flea's Broadsheet No. 12 has just been published. Poems by various hands, including my bloody one.

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I am hooked on Updike. I finished reading Rabbit, Run yesterday (my first e-book), and felt I had discovered a new guru. Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom knows he is made for something better than a stale life with wife and kid. Running off in pursuit of the good, without a map or a destination, he leaves behind him a trail of pain and disappointments, a trail that ends in a tragedy. What elates me is how, despite all kinds of social and personal pressures, Rabbit finally rejects responsibility for the tragic accident. The easy way out was to accept responsibility and so be locked into a socially sanctioned but personal intolerable reunion with his wife and kid, but Harry runs off, for the third time in the novel, winged by the painful and dubious joy of being alone responsible for one's life.

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What does Rabbit say to me as I look with GH for an apartment in which to start a joined life? I should be running into this new life, or this new life is not for me. And I am. And it is.

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