Cocktail Party

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It is a scrappy place, this world, and people walk
about, a series of prepositions displacing the nouns.
For instance, I was thinking on death (not about)
when someone spoke to me and I thought (then) how only
here, in a scrappy place, was it possible to interrupt death
the way, eating an olive, you stop to spit out the pit.
Unless the center has been already removed, the way
our bodies have that long column of hollowness
from one end to the other (mouth, throat, stomach, intestines)
so that you can actually enter the body
without ever touching it. I have been told so many things
about the body, and about death, and different kinds of
olives (black, green, red, brown) -- which borders on what
I mean by scrappy -- and still there is something
I cannot delve, something I am -- though at a party --
not allowed to touch, say, know, or anticipate,
and it is only when this column of air is actually closed off
that we die (or accidentally by swallowed obstruction)
so when I was interrupted -- more pistachios? -- I wanted to
say not now, but silence -- which is not death -- prevailed
and I went on speaking: thank you.

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