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   t h e    r e d c o a t s    a r e    c o m i n g!

--- M I C H A E L   M A G E E


	for Matt Hart & Chris Stroffolino

We have a firm committment to Europe. We are part of Europe. -- Dan Quayle

You'd like to think that the march from cricket to rounders to baseball was linear, and representative of some transcendental tendency toward democracy, -- "the basic symbolic agency through which the British colonials transformed themselves into..." but, in fact, it is absolutely true!

for, if playing pinochle w/ Pinochet is any indication we're four cards short of a full deck and counting the lousy meld into yesterday's "game of chess," well, there's your Middleton, & there's your three Websters, none of whom can alchemize their slumming into something less than condescension: precedent is the elegant festschrift for the form-amorous whip

(then, in the course of humorous events, some white folks don red face to throw em tea-in-harbor party; theater having an invisible hand of its own, liberty was rarely on their side thereafter, "intolerable acts" of war looking for Philip's head inherited by suits clasping SAMUEL ADAMS ä in your local pub on their mother's side, their wives making "minute men" jokes)

...in the "fireside cookbook of cryptology" were all the old stories, -- how we bounced and played along the surface like a bandlength of wavy gypsies bound for a joust-n-mount party in the ionosphere. What happened then is a matter of some debate, or a mutter that summed a bet, a bet about matters of meter, de- pending on who you talk to, and when...

this was the purpose and we took it with nothing to offer you but our old Blood Sweat & Tears albums we engaged a man or woman known as "performance" to a man or woman called "Walks-With-Lack-Of-Sheet-Music," referring to it as a pilot, or the trailer for a pilot. You saw London, you saw France, you saw Walks-With-Lack-Of-Sheet-Music's underpants, on which were written the laws of Kings, Dukes, et al, and their "deffersits," -- a tabula rasa for girls without curls and boys with lost dolphins:

the only time "of" would be used was in phrases such as "the tennisball of my eggplant." No matter how many times it happened, having ones nerves extracted from dermis, epidermis, would be really unnerving. There's more than one way to skin a cat and all of them would be illegal. These laws were like family friends to us.

Or else, only address reversal, -- somnabulist walks across Atlantic, up the winding stairs of the nearest Victorian and, screaming, "Grandpa!" holds a pistol to Dr. Arbuthnot demanding his confession. Compulsory reps with Eddie's pal in a faux-ancestral comport, the hot rod's racing stripes and flames painted on the refrigerator box of revolting behavior. Attack word-circled wagons; ramble-tack, flank speed, past his storied flank; pass traffic in the middle; rake the language.

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