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We stopped going to school after our parents died.  Grieving would distract us from our lessons, we reasoned.  Who could be expected to learn cursive while under such duress?  And because evading the army of replacement parents occupied much of our time, no one could reach us to prove otherwise.
Friends were the new enemies.  We spent our evenings locking the deadbolt, checking the peephole, latching the chain. People came by often, and when they did we pretended we were sick or dying or dead or gone. The house we lived in smelled like moist shag carpeting, and we scrubbed it without mercy.  Sponges shined up the cakey floors.  Our wrinkly fingers paled from the soak of bleach water.  The old and moldy furniture smelled like itself, so we moved all of it onto the front lawn, where it looked lovely.  And after eating in our new sunlit dining room, we stepped inside to sniff out our work.  Nothing had changed.  The smell remained, full-fledged and fetid, and it grew stronger as we walked from room to room.

[caption id="attachment_541" align="alignleft" width="142" caption="photo: Howard Goodman"][/caption] It's Easter.  I don't have any chemically-colored eggs or chocolate that I can offer you here, no old zombie stories, just unnatural spring weather on a planet that has officially had 324 consecutive months of global temperatures exceeding their long-term average for any given month.  You can convert that to years, if you're feeling brave.  You can pray, if it helps.  And you can read poetry. It's Easter, and before you go searching for new eggs or reborn gods or just plain hope, let me share this living soul, a human deity, whose intelligence and compassion fill me with that hope we are constantly seeking.  His name is Andrew Acciaro, and he lives and works near me in Peekskill, next to the Hudson River. Andrew lives and breathes the poetic life, and it is impossible for me to chose even one poem of his to share, as each goes in such different directions, as if Andrew is dipping into the consciousness of all styles, past, present and future to offer vital messages of the now.

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