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Archive for the ‘love’ Category

Like Love

Posted in beat poetry, love, poetry, prose, random, Uncategorized on August 15, 2019| 3 Comments »

When heated, coals become incandescent, glowing red-hot.
When were you the most coal?
Where did the spark start?
Lightning-footed before your head even knew it, till suddenly: poof– hairs are on end; your body electric?
Were you then pulled in? Washed over? Was it warm, did you let yourself burn, or were you magnetized in moment? In momentum? In monumental feeling? Familiar and old as bones?
Like moon;
With gravitational pull, consequently prompting the oceans to tide. All approximately 67% water of us.
Have you overflown, salty-wet? Basked in spilled star light, reflecting in lovers’ eyes? Awake awake awake and not in mind for sentence assembly, as something else occupied your mouth? Full. Filled.
We would likely quake when over-swept with thoughts to imagine the other side of this closeness emptied and airless; Before love, or without it.
Once that taste is stoked, palettes evolve standards, and these are models of desire, and this want is driving force, and resistance is no dice. So we keep at it, poke it, feed it.
When filled, thy cuppeth runneth over. And have you lately? Please, please.
Been crowded with passion. All red and heart hued. Exotic butterflies dancing in stomach, reminding us of the good stuff. The reason. The prompt. The time to tend to. And did you manage complete presence, and achieve surrender?
Fresh-out-the-kitchen, hot-off-the-griddle, flushed pie, ready to eat, just made for lovers with nose to nose kind of mornings. Skin to skin kind of nights.
The world, our oyster. The sea- ever-bearing.
It just takes a flicker to glow. Bioluminescent fervor.

IMG_5749

 

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Dear John Part 1 For Now and The Case of Misdirected Emotions

Posted in death, dying, friendship, loss, love, poetry, Uncategorized on July 1, 2018| Leave a Comment »

It’s nice that they start putting up signs along the road for the hospital a few blocks before you get there, because after a while the numbness starts to fade and you need something to guide you.
Even if it’s a familiar traverse. You basically need your hand to be held.
You need to be told,     left,       next left,       right,       keep going,       turn here.
Your head can be a’swim.

It is evident now that it matters not- how woven in you are to the fabric of people’s lives. It won’t prevent you from vaporizing to nothingness at the 1st instance of death. Death won’t hesitate to do nasty black-magic tricks with your face, making you vanish. It’s not shy. There is no couth. It’ll greedily, hungrily claim you. Your binds won’t keep you. The strings you’ve spent your days fortifying can’t hold you down or tie you to another in the physical realm.
And yet- it does matter- as it is the fabric that stitches the rest of us together. That covers us. That warms us on this breezy plain. This warm place. Placid place. Bone-chilling place. Sweltering place, where there has been time for every kind of weather and sensation until perhaps the day where an abrupt cut-off occurs and you find your way navigating in a metal box- eyes fixated, and on the look out for reflective, square, blue H’s of signage to tell you where to go. Where to find a friend in distress, removed from hanging in the balance.

If you love someone that’s been in an accident, there’s no telling what you’ll do. Will you cry and howl? Will you retract into yourself, sink your eyes back, seep into your own skin? Will you adopt a straight-backed, stomach-lining-acidifying stoicism? Will you be like me, where every ounce of brain exits it’s holding places and flees for complete cloud cover- leaving me temporarily to fumble for words, and forget all the names of people known to me for years when the nurse asks for introductions.
A thick soup of space replacing my free thoughts. A questionably protective gelatin that pads my consciousness in order to keep the inevitable away & at bay for more moments. Perhaps. Seems sensible amongst the nonsensical…

When you arrive at the hospital conglomerate- the mass complex of buildings with incongruous architectural bids in huddle- the maze of pain and occasional welcomed wellness reports- your feet may take over- you may run as if your life, their life, -life- depended on your pulse; contributing. You may want to cry out to the 3rd run-in with reception about your confusion as to where is my friend. I don’t understand anything at all right now. Where even are we? How could you do this?
Every station. Every elevator. Every corridor. A repetition of it’s rude self, each not leading to his room. Time ticking cruel modules.

Have you ever seen a loved one propped up with a plastic brace, wired, hooked to monitors and intubation? Liquid red lines leaking from his ears; blackened, swollen eyes?
None of the machines synch up with their bell-sounds, their compressing, their dripping or collecting. There is no calming rhythm in which to find a small piece of peace.
There are plastic bobs and bits everywhere, linking a network to create breath and eased airflow.
There are computers with the sole purpose to oversee heart function- where their whole life they scribble and drag green lines across bowed screens that inform people of the seemingly small spectrum between okayness and trouble.
If you experience a friend on life support you’ll quite likely feel a combative compulsion to sit beside them and grab their arm, all the while the same part of you, but on the backside of it- wanting to leave the area the second you smell the room.
Run like a wounded deer in hard light.
Head for dry, high land far from quaking earth.
Like the first time you see a naked lady dancing across the stage; that desire to lay your eyeballs across her body, and the other to fumble in your pockets and squint squint squint hard and the sense of shame- feeling discomfort blame-able by a church thought you’d never even subscribed to.
But more perverse.

I can’t be the only one who’s claws extract.
I’m dangerous there. With their naked arms. I’ve learned twice. I will dig.
I will dig and I will wait for response and want response and sink further into grief and fear at lack of response. I want to hear them or see them react and make them mad. Get mad at me goddamn it and feel me right now! Just feel.
This arm will be false-warm. It will feel slightly gummy. I will only touch the warm parts. I tried to hold his hand because my mind had blocked the memory of what happened last time, but no. The hands are already cold and gone and I do not recommend them. I recommend staying away from appendages least ye be of masochistic proclivity.
Stay.
Away.
The hands are gone and this is where the death begins; at the edges.
And the questions begin to bubble at the sorry surface.
Are you here, friend? Are you hovering above us, like they say? Are you afraid or hurting? Is there a song that’d put you at ease?

Then you’re just there, and you want to go. And you want to stay. And what’s a girl to do. And the shock won’t release you and it will take so long to thaw and you will feel like you’re in on a terrible joke with a small slice of others- against the rest of the people like the Jackelope in South Dakota. Like some silly pact gone unspoken with friends to make the rest of the world feel like shit; wishing they’d gone to see him that one last time they’d meant to; gone sailing with him more; not been a flake those times- because he was always there. One of the few.

It’s the most impossible thing to believe. Absence. Permanent absence. The hum on the line. Forever static. No more-ness.
And you think: life without you? Well I just wasn’t ready. And we had plans. And you had plans. And that is lovely but meaningless without someone to make them become.
And this gurney wasn’t made with you in mind. Your strong body is the wrong body and how unfair is this.

The slightest infraction- I tell you/ believe me- my friend is gone and do not fuck with me now because fury will reign down upon you because my feelings are so full of barbs that your spilled, spoiled blood has been matched by my own punctured heart and my anger at your loss will not bring you back but I burn. I burn so hard now that I am a flame. And I must be an inch down the line in stages of grief because I’ve set my numbness on misdirected fire with nothing to ignite but fog. And yet still, I find this all utterly unbelievable.
Please shake me to wake me.

Inevitably you will be woken up, but it will be from inconsiderate neighbors who are wearing the all in all twin blinders of alcohol and summer weekend feelings, who aren’t really doing anything terrible. You will yell at them and you will tell a complete stranger to shut the fuck up and go fuck themselves. So bad you will yell so bad and loud and mad at them that you need to stand before a fan to calm down and cool out. You will pace for a while there after and want to punch the walls. You will by hyper aware of their normal movements below you in their own apartment once they’ve hurried back inside. You will find an unattractive, indulgent satisfaction with making them scared a little, or at least you will perceive their fear and feel a small triumph. You’ll wonder about that. You will be the biggest buzzkill. It will only  suck for everybody. I will not bring your loved one back. But…. given this behavior being very alien to you- you can at the very least have a private chuckle that he’d have been  been kinda proud….

 

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So Close Love/ Too Far Sun

Posted in love, poetry, prose, random, relationships, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 28, 2018| 9 Comments »

You sun-spot you
you bright-but-tempered
you worn soul.
You don’t hug your path, do you know
you cling to the gutters?
In one place?
You need more butter. To slide you along.

Can an aura be sideways?
Because you radiate different.
Your colors interupted
by the cover you wear.
You deny your brilliance to the people
by coloring yourself with dull, dollar-store crayons
with a Prisma-set just beside you.

You sun-spot you
more deflected than refracted,
pierced and pocked
It’s all beneath your shell
That hides your bed sores.
That’s very heavy.
You are a frightful site
You make a terrible crustacean.

With just one life
When will you be ready to bask in your own light?

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Clouds are Easy

Posted in art, creativity, inspiration, love, meditation, musings, nature, photography, prose, random, travel, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 7, 2018| 8 Comments »

Eves-dropping on neighboring cloud watchers across the isle:

–Young girl- maybe age 7- speaking in absolutes: “I see a hand.”
–Man beside her- maybe mother’s boyfriend: “I see it.”
Pause. Watch. Stillness. “I see some mashed potatoes.”
–Girl -calm: “Oh yeah. Yeah.”
“I see a coyote without legs. Do you see it?
Planes are huge. Almost bigger than the world. We’re almost to space. Did you know that?”
–Man attempts an explanation about atmosphere, stratosphere… starts out strong. Flounders. Reverts to talking about library books on the subject.

Girl turns her head from the window of Largest Views. She finds a heated shaft of sunlight taken to sitting on the top of her hand from the other side of the plane. My side.
Reflection projection.
Steady she holds it; her sun-hand. Her free hand whirling small fingers atop its partner’s radiance. Spinning a small dance above orphic golden. She wants to show her mother who sleeps;
Looking back and forth from mother to glow, mother to glow, mother to glow.
She is a kind child. I can tell. Her mother rests on, while dutifully with providence, she hosts the light.
Girl sees me looking and offers a soft-kid smile my way. It’s too late to look away. I’ve been indulgent in my dreamy observing.
Down she puts the sun.

Back to cloud-watch; the line between boredom and the ease of nothing else to do, giving call to the deciphering of true existences.
High game, low stakes.
Infinite interpretive possibility.
A pooh-bah baby; she tells what’s what. The crown in passing light.
In a flash I’m brought back too.
Times no linear thing when you’re suspended in the air and have exhausted your ink pad and reading resources and suddenly… I’m young again, head-scratching, squinting wonder, looking for what’s really out there.
By and by eking out that dolphin pattern of automatic coordination involving focus, locus and vergence.
If I’d stare hard enough… If she’d stare hard enough…

Now the mother’s eyes are opened and the three talk of sun. I hang on their words like heavy warm suds sky bath; well intentioned interloper that I am.
They share curiosities over cardinal directions; the great Atlantic acting to anchor the origin. Wondering just what they’re flying over. Wondering where the man’s house might be very right now.

In an instant the plane tilts- revealing a ground covered in snow. A secret held from us by the simple act of sheltering our eyes. Covered in snow, dotted in trees. All small far down. Snow inside of snow.

The clouds have begun to thread, actively uniting, they soon mimic the land below as a blanket and a few levels higher measured by hundreds of feet, or thousands if you’re good at guessing jelly-bean-jar-quantities; filtering sun, laying across us fly-ers, dressing us in riches of watermelon and orange juice two hues.

Girl, Man, Mother are quiet. My mind quite quiet. And the clouds- speak silence full into the figures we see of them. Wipe away to white. Begin again if you please.

stard

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Lightning House 

Posted in art, creativity, fiction, inspiration, love, music, musings, ordinary madness, photography, poetry in motion, prose, random, Uncategorized on August 2, 2016| Leave a Comment »

lightening house

Forty years.
Forty frosty, colorless years where which the silence had built, grown, & settled upon them like a heavy, deep-season blanket.
Forty years.
Forty of them; where the walls observed no good morning, hello, how was your day, did you hear about this, did you hear about that.
No congenial exchanges muttered.
The couple passed each other in the hallway, or might occasionally find themselves waiting for the frying pan, the television, or shower to be ready for their own use, impatiently. Wordlessly.
The beginning of the descent into the static, mute, existence resulted from no particular fight, but more of a long, blue-hot-burning that built, seemingly to the point of no return, & a terrible, despairing feeling of being stuck together in the house of pulled, private shades & blackened, hollow photos.
The house with the yard where the neighborhood children wouldn’t fetch their balls from. The house of anger. And the house of dashed dreams.
Throughout the time of the Big Freeze, one had taken up quilting. The other had become an origami savant of sorts. One had developed a fancy for cherry everything: pies, ice cream, liquors, preserves… The other: a determined reader intent on hungrily devouring all on the topic of the Ottoman Empire & it’s collapse.
Still- no sound uttered.
Their love for music had once untied them. United them.
Like sun slathered honey, smelling of dewy mornings, feeling like cut-back-fresh wisteria vines pointing & sun bound, they’d  listened with their then-warm-hearts & looked with soft-watery-eyes to the other half play. Nimble fingers. Fluid attachment to sound, to manipulation of keys, breezy build ups, unpredictable yet so-good-wow-crescendos.
Life times had come. Gone. Come. Gone.
There they were, embroiled in a semi-coexistence where none was to share any thought; the icey quiet had crept into all the pockets of possible return, all too long ago.
But. If. Ever.
And never with a nod or a pre plan- they were ever to find themselves on the porch at the same time…
The music. The sound generated. Together by the dueling keys. The compliment of their knowing hands crashing down upon the ivory.
Creating the wildest, sensible cacophony of exquisite sounds, speaking leagues through keys into the sky; could’ve convinced the ethers to rain. They would. They wanted.
Would have the porch sitters abandoning stoops.
Would stymie the squirrels in their gathering.
The birds would settle in. And watch. And absorb. And the music was goddamn living.
All the lives that were tampered down & tucked in & brutalized with nothingness through out the years.
There & then.
Life.
And then.
Without nod, or gesticulation, the songs would conclude.
And the door would creak open.
The floor boards would give their predictable sighs.
The television would roll on in careless fashion.
But those: the only sounds that remained.

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Evening Stroll

Posted in creativity, inspiration, little bit o this little bit o that, love, musings, ordinary madness, photography, random, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 28, 2015| 14 Comments »

A walk around the blocks.
At night.
When the lights are on in apartments within eyeshot bright enough revealing each illuminated box of walls, furniture, and lives taking place.
Where conversations abound, or peter-out.
Where honesty lays across the table, or secrets stay tucked under lightly-used to heavily saturated napkins.
Where sauces boil
and bubble and forgotten pies burn crisp.
Where old shoes line the entrances and extend into halls, tripping the innocent,
and plants curl yellow in the condensation of windows.
At night.

Where sounds of closing car doors echo louder in the hush.
And cats scramble with their better, dark-favored vision to the other side of the road. And skinny rats develop false confidence, obeying their hunger, scampering out of dirt holes to snatch fallen promise-crumbs.
Where people sleep in dingy, unforgivingly-hard, once-lustrous-marble doorways beneath blankets that once belonged to generous beds; and dream of colorful fantasy pictures, or terrible monsters, or vacations that they’ll take some other life time, or things that they’ll have forgotten by morning. Bother not.

Where pasty, sun-deprived gamers sit in fluorescent, 24 hour donut shops tactically moving board pieces, tantalizing early onset diabetes -dirty flirt-, gorging on fried-sugar-dough, systemically solidifying certainty of never getting laid again beyond glory-holes. Where cups of stale coffee tip and splash spotty pants from shaky hands, and ashy floors, and blurry eyes and sour breath.

Where new couples cruise the banks of the lake, holding hands, kissing at each bench, butterfly bellies.
Where cargo trucks roll about, containing clandestine items of unknown sourcing to half of the drivers. Do tell do tell.

At night.

A walk around my neighborhood.
Around blocks that have begun to encircle a sense of home.
At night where my dog and I walk in wonder.
And contribute to the spectacle of the quite observers observing.

beep.jpg

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You’re in the Jungle Now

Posted in art, creativity, inspiration, love, music, musings, ordinary madness, poetry in motion, tagged , , , , , , , on May 9, 2015| 4 Comments »

What’s the method to your madness? You know- the one where you pick at the scab or reactivate the cut again again, or bang your ever forever perma-bruise; only this time instead of puss coming out you get a fine, silky, viscous magic thread of your own musical splash.
Splash splatter shit.
All over your walls.
Hope your carpets’ not too absorbent, ma’ dude.
This welcomed mess; The kind you’ve been keeping your chin up for and doing all your positive visualization practices and your “this too shall pass” breaths. You’re totally pumped because boOm- your muse showed up just when you were trying to name it and give it form, and now all you want to do is make it suiting, stitchy clothes and dress it up like an angel. But it’s no angel, darling. You traded your soul for you art. And you knew that already.
Why do artists carry the cross? Why so encumbered? So fickle and burdened? I’m feeling a Stevie Ray Vaughn song coming on… something about sales… so dust off the wax and we can get those memory cells back on board. I don’t know that you’ll need them if you’ve got the right momentum, but a brain buzzing and flexing with optimal potential only services the rest of us too.
Good luck riding the rocket. And naming the fuel source. And being aware of when you gas up. Because the moon- she waits and the broom is busy.
Draw a picture for me when you get a second. I’ll be here trying to identify my own individual sound. For now all I know is that it’s likely set in minor chords… and probably a really sexy rhythm section.

ed40

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The Irony of Loveless

Posted in art, love, musings, ordinary madness, painting, photography, poetry in motion, random, Uncategorized on November 16, 2014| Leave a Comment »

I thought I told you not to ask me twice, because I blush when I can’t recall your birthday, or to ask about how your knee is feeling today, or if you worked out your most recent car issue…
It doesn’t stick and I have never known myself to be less invested in  someone I do care for, and it frightens me about myself- making me like you less.
I can sense your hands extending my way even when they are busy making lumps of your pockets, or interlocked, white-knuckled, behind you. I can feel the buzz of your questions, when your mouth forms a perfect, airtight  line. Your eyes- a welcoming brown and asking of me things that I can’t & won’t promise.

You ask me to be honest so I do and I am, but keep digging you do. You forget my humanity, in beta, treating me as though I tuck a cape secretly into my dresses; forgetting that I can only love you when you are happy in full & not look to me to fulfill this unspoken, expected duty to make flush your holes- pocked with insecurity. You forget how hard it must be for me to tell you constant disheartments, lest you never remembered- let alone realized.

Hurting the kindest person in the room. A bee stinging a bee. Squash blossom strains cross pollinating: creating a mealy, deceptive, lackluster hybrid. A dog, a tail: perpetual circling.

Your accolades stroke me, cocoon me, croon to me, make me sweet on you when you are not light enough to blow off the tower in response to my altered breathing. Your enviable sincerity. In my mirrored comparable to you this would equate to ghost netting/ nothing to show.

But love is it’s own world that hasn’t handle bars; and to grip and grasp- a fruitless way to hang on. Because it all boils down to feeling. Feeling with out the illusion of urgency. Feeling and truth commingling. And the foresight to not fear your intuition.

I disappoint myself in light of you. In your shadow I cannot commit and reciprocate. It’s tragicomedy. To want love so bad/ and be incapable of return. I do love you, but not how I would if I could.

glow hand

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Did it!

Posted in inspiration, love, musings, nature, photography, random, travel, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 15, 2014| Leave a Comment »

So here you are. You picked up and you moved. Finally. You finally moved- (Good job.)
Something you’ve been talking about for a thank-goodness-noone’s-counting long of time. Three years? Four? Enough time for change to brew to the point of the bubble over. So you ride out in the cascade, thinking of the times where you were so detached from holds and your spirit was far freer, though before you left, feeling tied-down you did not. You just felt… cozy. Comfy. Copacetic. And it’s those C words that can be dangerous.
Because that’s no place to stand.
So you took off in the name of new C words, like new conquests. Like crazy. Like can’t stop won’t stop. And it can all just be so fun. If only you let it. And if only you can conceive of it. Or perhaps just let. it. go.
So you done gave it all up. The pretty house. The fun & loving social circle. The sweet man. The main income sources. In the name of…?
And you’re not quite sure, when people ask you this every-day-question, of quite how to respond to it. The answer varying, dependent on mood, on weather, on wind velocity, or based upon the most recent strangers’ interaction. All in all it is hardly surmisable.
It is the untouchable. And it takes focus to remember that not all is to come with a black and white outline. And it is to show that sometimes you gotta pull that thread from the old sweater. Perhaps those tired sleeves’ll fall off. Or it’ll just keep going until your left with a new ball of yarn. And you can be kind and donate it to the kitten company, bringing them a smile to wiggle their whiskers. Or you can go yarn-bomb the town.
And that’s California, man. The land of possibility.
The golden state, for it’s expanse, and so-many-subcultures, museums & eateries, everywhere art & art galleries & feral or lawful graffiti, mania, excitement; native pride & alcatraz take over; animal parades & freaky carnivals, pop-up-shows, seedy establishments, fresh-fortune cookies, raw struggle & swollen riches, lawlessness, confusion, and contagion, and on on on.
And ocean.
And green; for dripping night-blooming-datura plants; massive, shedding, fragrant eucalyptus, girthy taproot, secure base; established, luscious thick, envious jades; swishy, flirting-with-blocking-the-moon-palms; nooks and crannies: a dream for sleepy monkeys if only one would escape it’s captivity, or the ideal habitat for weary squatter and mangey pooch.
And brown; for trash upon trash in the city parks, don’t-drop-your-keys-in-the-gutter-because-how-dirty-streets; filthy, creepy alleyways where you must pretend not to have a smart phone or sucker you might be; curbside furniture left for days, covered in soot; mysterious weaves on the ground; white bums with black hands.
You might not have realized how grimy it could be. And how distracting, to boot.
But that’s ok- it’s your renaissance.
On your time. And you made it.
You are in charge of celebrations.

Viva su revolucion!

photo 2

photo 1

instagram.com/mermada_en_piephoto 3photo 5

 

photo 1 photo 5photo 3

photo 4

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If You Please: A Mini Questionnaire

Posted in creativity, inspiration, love, musings, photography, random, Sexy fresh, travel, tagged , , , , , , , , , on May 7, 2014| 20 Comments »

Can I ask you some questions? Would you be so kind as to take a moment to reflect for me? It’s about you. It’s for me… well, for now. But I have ideas OF COURSE. So if you prefer, you can answer anonymously. You can even have my personal email: thelighteningcan@gmail.com and I will respect your privacy when I reiterate. Though, I don’t think you’ll be feeling too exposed when you get right down to it.
I want to know 3 things.

  1. What makes you unique?
  2. What makes you special?
  3. What makes you fortunate?

I have answered these questions with my own brain to provide a template of depth I hope to find, verses some topical answer. Answer in one part, two parts, three parts… whatever. Get loose with it!

Baby L (me)

  1. What makes you unique?

a. Often- I’ll see people that seemed deeply embroiled in a heavy make out session, all intertwined and public. Then upon further inspection it turns out that it is in fact just one, solitary obese person.
b. A new vocabulary word that I have never used before will be on the tip of my brain upon wake, awaiting its debut in my conversations perhaps.
c. I dream about water bodies in some capacity every night.

  1. What makes you special?

I care deeply for justice and work towards it in some way almost every day. I have wired my life around it.

  1. What makes you fortunate?

a. I am fortunate because I have creative, tireless brain that when on the right trajectory has the capacity to produce beeeaaauuuty! And crazy drive. I am constantly getting new, cool ideas for art on a larger scale. I’ve always been dipped in some form of self-expression.
b. Also, I have parents that have been supportive of my zany ways that differ so strongly from their approach at life. We love each other.
c. I have a beautiful house and beautiful friends.
d. I’ve been granted with an overall positive disposition.
e. I consider myself pretty self-aware and am always striving to be my best self.
f. I got rhythm for days and I ain’t afraid of no dancefloor!

So there it is. Spice it up/ break it down. I’m listening. Sock it to me (((please!!)))!

play this

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