WEBVTT

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"Small Pill Of Smoke"

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How does life ever end without
a sparrow to complete it?

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How does life begin, except
soberly in a bad dream?

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If you were more
like the sparrow,

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there would be less
to catalog, and you

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could pass from beam to beam,
having to make up fewer things.

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A chisel secreted there
many years ago by a child

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falls from the beam,
and the dream ends.

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The small pill of smoke
falls from its cupboard also.

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Seven days sober, Mr.
Sparrow, and the story

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of life with time on its hands
drops a little less severely.

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My lucky number was,
is, always had been 18.

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What did it bring me?

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A mural of stick
figures and green farms

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because my number was closest
on either side to the number

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my teacher had written on
the blackboard and then

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cupped over with her hand.

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My sister and brother softly
made sparrows and other birds

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to hover over the stick figures.

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Each Sunday, I dropped
the small pill of smoke

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in the locomotive stack.

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The tender whistled.

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I made the tender especially
whistle near the mural,

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white smoke, sober
smoke, disappearing

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catalog of your mind and days.

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Sparrow, if I accept
the secret of sobriety,

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will you accept my
small pill of smoke?

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Why don't you call
me sometime next week

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and tell me what you were doing.

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Tell me a story or a dream,
or I will tell you one.