The Collective

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Authors: Stephen King
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the rate of $50,000 a year to raise rooks. They send an ornithologist over on the concord with two cases of rook eggs packed in these shatterproof cases - they keep the shipping compartment constantly heated and all that stuff.
    So this guy has a new business - North American Rook Farms, Inc. He goes to work right off incubating new rooks so London will not become a rookless city. The only thing is, the London City Council is really impatient, and every day they send him a telegram that says: " Bred Any Good Rooks lately? "

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THE HARDCASE SPEAKS
    STEPHEN KING
    From Contraband #2
    In fields and christless allies the psalter is handed
    greedily around with purple bottles of cheap port
    punctuated by the sodium lightness glare of freights
    rising past hobo cinder gantries and pitless bramble hollows:
    Dukane, Grand Rapids, Cedar Forks, Harlow, Dover-Foxcroft,
    names from the back platform of the A-train
    so don't gimme that shit don't gimme that crap
    I'll put the hoodoo on you, I can do it, it comes in a can
    in 1954 in a back alley behind a bar they
    found a lady cut in four pieces and written in her juice on the bricks above
    he had scrawled PLEASE STOP ME BEFORE I KILL AGAIN in letters that leaned and
    draggled so they called him The Cleveland Torso Murderer and never caught him,
    it figures
    all these liberals are brainless
    if you want to see jeans just peak into any alabaster
    gravel pit in Mestalinas
    all these liberals have hairy shirts
    Real life is in the back row of a 2nd run movie house in Utica, have you been
    there
    this guy with his hair greased back was drunk
    and getting drunker when I sat down and his face kept twisting; he cried I'm a
    goddamn stupid sonofabitch but doan choo try to tell me nothin I didn't he
    might have come from Cleveland
    if the stars are right I can witch you I can make your hair fall out
    You don't need hairy jeans to stand outside a Safeway
    store in Smalls Falls and watch a cloud under the high
    blue sky ripple the last shadows of summer over the asphalt parking lot two
    acres wide
    A real hack believes blackboards are true
    for myself I would turn them all soft like custard scoop
    them feed them to blackbirds save corn for murderers
    in huge and ancient Buicks sperm grows on seatcovers
    and flows upstream toward the sound of Chuck Berry
    once I saw a drunk in Redcliff and he had stuffed a newspaper in his mouth he
    jigged jubilantly
    around a two shadowed light pole I could gun you down with magic nose bullets There are still drugstore saints
    Still virgins pedalling bikes with playing cards affixed to the rear spokes
    with clothespins
    The students have made things up
    The liberals have shit themselves and produced a satchel-load of smelly
    numbers
    Radicals scratch secret sores and pore over back numbers bore a little hole in your head sez I insert a candle light a light for Charlie Starkweather and let your little light shine shine shine play bebop
    buy styrofoam dice on 42nd street eat sno-cones and read Lois Lane
    Learn to do magic like me and we will drive to Princeton
    in an old Ford with four retread skins and a loose manifold that boils up the
    graphite stink of freshcooked
    exhaust we will do hexes with Budweiser pentagrams and old
    Diamond matchboxes
    chew some Red Man and let the juice down your chin when you spit
    sprinkle sawdust on weird messes
    buy some plastic puke at Atlantic City
    throw away your tape player and gobble Baby Ruths
    Go now. I think you are ready.

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Harrison State Park '68
    Stephen King
    Published in "Ubris", 1968
    "All mental disorders are simply detective strategies for handling difficult life situations.''
    —Thomas Szasz
    ''And I feel like homemade shit.''
    —Ed Sanders
    - Can you do it ? She asked shrewdly
    From the grass where her nylon legs in gartered splendor made motions.
    - Can you do it ?
    Ah!
    What do I say? What are the cools? Jimmy Dean? Robert Mitchum? Soupy Sales?
    Modern Screen Romances is a tent on the grass Over a dozen

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