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HOME ABOUT BRENDA KEATS HOUSE THE OVERDOSE LIFE AND DEATH IN CAMDEN DEATH AND THE MAIDEN THE ENFIELD SONNETS THE PAIN CLINIC THE FORDWYCH HOUSE EXTRACT NEW POEMS PROTESTS ART GALLERY REVIEWS LINKS |
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THE PAIN CLINIC
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| THE PAIN CLINIC Part 2 PAGE ONE | ||||
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So many are the days, I no longer Belong to them and I cannot summon An echo or its momentum after, For the buried words I am lost among. May is heavy in the darkened early Leaf hold of a far evening left as though At the reach of another shore, slowly Dissolving in the lengthening shadow. All night I have struggled with memory, Trying to make a meaning of it all, Weighing the years and their proximity The distance of the future left to stall. Imagination running on empty Parrying the end and the verb ‘to be’. 12th May, 2004
THE PAIN CLINIC PART 2 Love, that you should come to me after so Much sorrow, after years keeping only The earliest light before love's shadow Spread as a tide of endless night, slowly And calmly engulfing each day until Death was a beacon over the water. How long have I walked through margin and rill, Narrowing confines and horizon where The critical shadow is reflection, A journey without end, a compulsive Upholding current, imagination, Just as love survives always fugitive And near, yet weariness planetary, A mirror's coastal light, my destiny.
I wanted someone to say that it was All right but there was no one to console Me and no one as you were then because The future was no longer a control. How I remember that evening before The assassination of Kennedy, And childhood's calmly detonating core At the menarch's tremulous history. Middle aged without you, always alone, The years had become a sabbatical In hell and fear was night's diurnal hone Vacillating and inexplicable, Its possibility so suddenly Made real as the menopause was to be.
Surprised by love, in labour in a dream, I remembered that I was a poet Bearing down love again, enough to seem Almost real. It was already too late For life and yet too early for love, why Was my last child born waiting as a day Waits before its end and sensed only by My mind or your own vanishing away As love alone that cannot be returned. How have I missed you, never having known Your bonding or your birth, absence I learned To live with nursing silence to atone. I give myself to the world, memory New with time, with its own identity.
23 Fitzroy Road I stand before a house and the blue plaque Of Yeats which drew you without warning or Omen to that last February dark. The incongruity of its closed door, And the street leading off into Primrose Hill, spanned almost by a tree's winter girth, All around the streets circle and enclose As I struggle with myself, my life's worth No more than far trees branching from distance Resolved in a cold without wind or rain, An emptiness distinct as neon once Certain, an existence only to drain Away, while the air heavy with snow's pall Darkens over the earth and will not fall.
Where the high adjacent aviary Strands its storm over London, caged birds fly Against the netted turrets endlessly Encircling an illusion of the sky. At times I have known this park, nearly out of my mind with fear, an impossible Pleading with horizon from fear's redoubt Always to remain imperceptible. I wander, like Tsvetayeva, bereft Of children, and hear in her last tumult A sound of letting go, 'like a log left Behind', time held back in a catapult, 'My country has failed to take care of me', Night, the colour of the aviary.
And suddenly the Sibyl of Cumae Caged among a throng in the market place, To answer to the young 'I want to die'. Where the spirit is the syntax and case Ending of a poem, death is a shadow Awaiting its hour, what was a question Has now become a reality no Answer could reveal. From that confusion When even the spirit fails to exist, Poetry is time's equilibrium, Through filaments of light, memory missed Or abandoned, there is a life to come. You alone sustain and your moon's black hour Lets fall a snow's indelible shower.
It was nearly two years before you were Able to return to the home of your Youth as a brother reconciled after A long estrangement, but anything more Unlike the return of the prodigal Son could not have been imagined. Nothing Was left to prevent the improbable Evening and still a closed daylight changing Into its last endless February Night. And the darkened stars were not in their Places unlooked for after memory Mushroomed fluorescent from the empty air, Horizon was just a fugitive star, Only the stars remain familiar
The vestiges of their incandescence Are everything I have known, light without Shadow, inconsequential in a sense Of time, a grey unlit arena out Of which the known and the unknown must be Found. While April abandoned, derelict And irrelevant with austerity Makes night as day under Nature's edict, Unable to assuage the agony When poetry or life without meaning Threatens life itself in a jeopardy Of words found and lost to their echoing. As the scuttled stars a primary cry Beyond earth's echo lasts and will not die.
Always left over, the end like a thief Came in the night, unreal and ignoble And in the disarray left behind, brief As the flight of a Passover angel My first born son went away. Brother rose Against brother with almost nothing left To say and a blind rivalry that chose, Leaving nothing behind. And yet bereft, A mother searches in vain a former Order holding everything in its place, Searches to remain, only to see her Children as days that end without trace. 'He was lost and is found', the last echo Of the prodigal son I used to know.
I have an experience within me As of great stones being moved into place, To have known that much of infinity, Though everything else has failed, is to face All that I cannot understand, and yet What are these stones when the only answer Is the Giant's Causeway tumbling down. Let The dark sea's utmost currents close over Me if I should have harmed any of my Children, but you placed a millstone around My neck from the moment they were born, why? Because I brought them forth and through them found Myself and then from your weight was set free To stand before the old man of the sea.
For years I walked shallows clear with you while Your weight bore me downwards from the first time I read of you to my last stumbling mile, Your silence always a prophetic mime Of all the blame you laid on me and my Endless, unforgivable fault, children That grew alongside of you. Must I try That long road and the unforgotten sun Bright torture, all the grey vanished trawling Moons of almost thirty years, to know how To begin even as great stones moving Unbroken sea, historical and now, Releasing rhythm an awakened dream And below the surface of things that seem.
And worse than death is the living death of Life itself, that zero hour when the end Masquerades as its own shadow and love Is an echo of loss without amend. What am I left but that open endless Shifting road to return to and beyond Which there is nothing, an imprinted stress Swathing through shallow sand, yet abandoned As its memory behind me. I turn Around only to face my own folly, A woman in love destined to return, To bear again the old man of the sea Alone through hell, beyond hope or despair, Left to walk in the stoop of the sea there.
Adele Wolman I cannot find the right words for someone Who was always there just a shadow through A window when the evening tasks were done And Abbey Road an interval of new Nearing, of far found bird song clamouring Until the day had begun. Have I grown Indifferent lately, emerging spring Unfolding its manifold green, unknown For the first time unreal and unnoticed, Late magnolia was almost over Before I could remember something missed, Inlaid whiter than sepulchral colour And April's darkest storm, and apprenticed Beyond time that its echo might exist.
The right word has taken so long to find That its effort hardly seems to have been Worthwhile, something is always left behind Remaining perpetually unseen. What am I when the outlandish restless Day effaces as an ordinary London window yet leaving a redress Within time's design, the anatomy Of a single line. The way words oppress And to no end with just the physical Word on a page as a silent witness, And the mind's echo completes a circle And a struggle of labour against time, For the end, for the words no longer mine.
A shadow through a window, yet you were Always there, the background of each leaving, My head held high always as the nearer Shadow when I returned. There is nothing Now but an unfamiliar window And we are the shadows on the other Side, the sounds of city traffic that blow Like wind across glass in the distilled air. Nothing is certain anymore and all Around me time's permanence has begun To fall apart, each day impossible Dreams awaken their own oblivion., Yet through glass unreal in candle flicker, Time unbroken circled at your Shiva.
‘When art is derived from pain it is worth Nothing' and I can only answer then With my own pain and the time of its birth And final as the knowledge of Eden. I am myself as nothing walking through Regents Park, May evening light is oblique, Lake birds preen and remain at their ease, few Or simultaneous. Nearby the mosque Turns from domed high gold leaf into night grey London distance, I struggle to answer Another's pain but cannot find my way. To imagine, we must learn to suffer For each other, at the heart of language Beauty is a sword time cannot assuage.
I shall not write about beauty only, Because its truth is not what I have known, Reluctantly and quietly beauty Comes unknowingly and to truth alone. If poetry is merely the sound of Itself yet history within language Unfolding, then is the meter of love An incandescent rhythm as the age I sing of, and without love, of what am I composed when chance and impossible Reckoning are stars beyond depth or span, And pain but a jettisoned syllable, And art no more than beauty can attain, For a life that after has lived in vain.
The problem of pain, and it will not go Away, it exists beside Keat's Grecian Urn, with beauty's truth put aside as though Unreal, beauty is not oblivion, But even as a century reaches Its end, the mind's pain has nothing to hold On to, and left alone with fear, searches The spirit's arsenal for truth untold, Or the way beyond your death in Fitzroy Road, where I stand lost and rehearse your end To stay alive. The words are without joy, An overgrown garden I cannot tend, Endless, wordless, as the leftover pain, For a love that after has lived in vain.
The Fordwych House Extract I drew a fire at Fordwych House which burned From my mind to a pale sky, consuming In its wake, after and before, and turned Now into the end a shadow smoking, Dissolving deep within the splintered wall Of a high endless orange controlling Flame, overturning, irretrievable, And huge once with youth's unbroken meaning. I cannot finish what I have begun, There is no one left to tell me who I Am, the simple words, what have they become, And the end as the haze of a pale sky. I no longer know the poet in me, Charred words smoke the holes of eternity.
My throat is filled with its own emptiness And a silence cries out from this fire where The end is endless and flames coalesce And spark the far evaporated air Seared within as blue dark over London, The smoking residuum of what I Am and everything I might have done, The undone and the day's unanswered why. Where are the stars in the carbon of my Burning, the empty sockets gape where they Have been and what is there left to steer by But a numberless blue vanishing day, Breaking pulsing neon orange as a Smoke drifts upward, its low shawled nirvana.
There is no road out of this inferno, Neither backwards nor before. Days that meet In their beginning, beyond tomorrow Or yesterday, encircle with a heat Impassable, permanent as blue sky Unchanging or a sun I cannot turn Away from, black, and as the beauty I once read and the brightest day. Here I learn To forget, to remember yet once more That last reach of language, the spirit's tongue, Its silence and all I am alive for Levelling above me, transfixed among Fast airless flame, softly falling charcoal Ignites the unlit levels of my soul.
Time after is no more a part of me Than far flame melting into a white haze. All that went before is my destiny And always an endlessly spreading maze, The lost directions and inadvertent Pathways a reverberating echo From conduits of choice and chance in constant Fusion of futility and shadow. What road did I come by and where do I Go from here, as a planet left behind, ‘Out of this world’, an overwhelming why Every day fans a fire in my mind. Without the stars I cannot find my way, Their empty sockets gape for a new day.
And all my days are tomorrows, nothing Exists in its present tense. How can I Answer anyone when everything I have known rests and decays in the why Or hold of the heart's scaffolding, and fast Locked as rust that cannot be dismantled, Where the props of half a century last Longer than slow dissolution untold Within, where the spirit is bound about With chains of its own making and the hell Of experience alone, yet cries out For heaven unheard and impossible. The rods are clamped over feeling and flame, Only the words and their knowledge remain.
I had nothing to go on but my own Fearful heart, what use is that to me now? It was not enough, nor for the unknown Half guessed at or dreamed of and yet somehow Always there just beyond the fear, outside My reach and a life that has come apart. And although there was nowhere left to hide I failed to find a refuge from the heart, Its first familiar unending why Rending into sojourn and horizon, Echoing the spirit left to defy Just beyond the flame. The answer driven, Fuelled by the wind in mockery after, Even to the heft of its last whisper.
It was not enough nor could it ever Have been, nothing can apprehend such loss And the failure of the spirit after. All that remains is to take from the dross Something worthwhile or just the memory Of joy, something of a life that might have Been, yet something left over to tell me Who I am. Everything is fugitive And spills and runs, and is as mercury, To the ground, the furrowed field overflows With rain, my shadow disappears, any Semblance is what the surfacing wind throws, For the fields of home lie under the rain In dreams and I cannot walk there again.
There is no road out of this inferno, Here the flames lap at the edge of being As pages in an open book, the slow Words curl black a cursive script scorched peeling Back from language into another tongue. While the city drifts through smoke in a haze Anchorless, its topmost heights lean among Featureless flame, the corners of stunned days Are sudden blue reflections over sealed Far windows, braced against a trawling grey Urban light, where smoke seared the white concealed Shadows as darkness on the surface lay. The indecipherable pages burn And their wordless shadows in the wind turn.
Yesterday's sunlight in a corridor Listlessly drifted downward on people Gathered haphazard from the day before. I belonged there and assumed that formal And almost casual abandon when Life itself is standing in the doorway Rehearsing its own history, open And on equal terms with death in a way Impossible again, and a brief sun Falling and slanting down on the morning After your death, through the wane of time won Back and its replica before drowning. I wait there unable to stay or go, Trapped as light lost within an inferno.
A fierce wind had already begun, You heard it rage and turn round outside ward Nineteen endlessly trying to get in, Its under-surface as a wave, a sword Edge whitened, plunged into time left over And the wake of time before, channeling The currents of existence forever Diverted and altered, left encircling And sudden, and yet as a memory Of irretrievable wind where the end And the panic, your last hour my journey Away from you, while a tired wind opened Up and closed behind me. I could not breathe, Surrounded on all sides by the wind's heave.
I could think of nothing, there was nothing Left, nothing but a countdown to the end, ‘They said they're going to give her something, We've got to phone in an hour, at the end’. I have to go away, I have to go Back, but there is nowhere anywhere here, Everywhere the wind and its echo And the end of an hour hurrying near. Wind torn houses were shadows in a street, Debris blown over cobble-stone narrow And confined, where pathways of the wind meet In a night maze as paralysed shadow. Gable-ends from the back to backs of old Leeds reared sloped angles of rain to the cold.
Out of the depths of an October storm Where random gas light flickering alone, Flowing through night's configurated form And the reflected confluence of stone, Etching the darkness with a single flame While its white disseminated halo Lay broken and turned into wind and rain. The hazed driven diagonal shadow Smoking over every stone and crevice In a black elemental honeycomb, Fuelled from within to a moon white surface, And night contracted as an opened womb And about to give birth. I took my prize From the dark where light darts until it dies.
It was not enough, I have to go back, The words within can never put it right Though the rain there is a lasting wind, black And unstill in crevices filled with light Opening, enclosed round every stone, Every surface moving sheer under Foot. There night and day converged as wind blown, Walls high banked holding back the sea, over Their own horizon broken into massed Delirium round me, reflecting flame And gas light as though inanimate vast Time flowed in the carbon rhythm of rain. Before and after, as an undertow, A surface smoke from a burning shadow.
There was nothing to hold on to, the force Of night was upon me, its raging gale Engulfing directing even the course Of time. At every turn piercing hail Rolled across cobbles, fragmented, downward, Slanting into shallows perpetual Surface where light convulsed under the sword Edge and colourless impenetrable Rain, encircled on all sides and propelled By a wind without remorse, its smoke rose As steam from every stone, a black rain held Back and veering through a swathe of shadows. In the ginnel where steam erupts and sighs I hold your hand there as the moment dies.
I had to go away, it was the form Of things, no one was allowed to stay, no One. When I was told outside in the storm It was too late to go back, there was no Where to go back to and nowhere to go. And outside, your parting words that had seemed Unfamiliar were left in the rain, Far beyond anything that could be dreamed, There in the panic and wind they became Your whole life. This world would remain something You left behind, this world lay before me At my feet. Your last hour was hurrying To its end, pathways of the wind empty Meet in a maze of paralysed shadow.
There was no way out and no way through and The only road was the one we had come By, where you were just the span of your hand Away. How shall I find myself among These shadows to turn about and go back Without you, or the doors that were to close Against us when steep stone sides rose up black Before us. The distance an echo throws As it hollows in the fugitive space Behind us, an inconsequential veer Of sound, a reverberating surface Along open city streets, its source near And endless and enough to magnify A delirium, a pursuer's cry.
I wanted to stand still and for the first Time not feel I had to run against time As though each night had always been rehearsed, Every dream awake left as the end rhyme Or as the lost echo of another. An empty inaudible arena Within the monochrome sodium glare Of a dream's history, shadows in a Negative that flare into the colour Of dreams without sunlight, nights without end, When we followed the city streets to where There was no turning back. On a darkened Stage the unlit shadows dissolve away In the auditorium of a day.
Death had always been there on the night road, A presence as of someone else, a third Person between us there with no abode Keeping fast a silence I had not heard. Sometimes going before then following After but never as a pursuer, More as someone in the shadows working With the quiet manner of a waiter. But I had been in a sleep-walk all my Life, awaking to the reality Of an hour, houses in a street awry In the wind, death, reticent, uneasy, As though at a banquet with every right Quietly directing the darkest light.
And with no one else to turn to she turned To you because her children were still young. She had to raise us while she slowly learned Your ways, you were the seated guest among Her chores and the sojourner at the back Of all her days, content every day Just to sit there waiting, you were the black Pall and the haze that on the surface lay. It was not so much a slow suicide As much as the one sure absolute way Out, and with no money for food beside What she earned, the only thing she would say Was that ‘bread is the staff of life’. Nothing Was said about you at her back waiting.
On the cobbled stones of a city night Where do I begin, left with one last hour Of her ruin how shall I know what might Have been or what she would have said in her Last conversation? She was left alone To face it on her own as she had done So many times before, and with no one To turn to but her last companion And the silence of his hands upon her. Through a howling wind you came to the door In the guise of a fugitive like her, Seeking shelter for the journey before You and a refuge from the storm within. And the door opened and death was let in. __________________
It began in The Hollies, in a home For the children of those suffering from TB. And in the hospital alone, As a casual morning face among Friends, my mother laid there and dissembled, Hiding from all her colleagues, the cancer At her breast. While she held the assembled Nights of her life and those to come after, The days leftover and their utmost end, The insistent faces of her children Yet weaving round about through a darkened Cavalcade, with time held back and broken As the broken mooring of an orb web Is blown on the current of its own ebb.
My mother wrapped her silence around her With a certainty that would never end. She seemed always just ahead or after And alone on a road as it widened Backwards far into the reflected arc Of life itself. Sometimes stars, in the near Far shadows of a mirror in the dark, Charred the horizon and curved a last sear From an unrealized unreachable Time, where fifties neon pulsed and flickered, Darkness fragmented, indivisible, Trapped as space between its blue, green and red, The lost names blazing and pulsating, from And towards, in the rain and the rhythm.
We were slanted as road shadows that ran Along the surface of the station’s white Wall darkening with a distant night span Of neon, an impenetrable night Rain blowing against its whitened stucco Was turned into stone and a storm laden Light in April. On the skyline the low Inscribed factory neon blazed open And enclosed leaving its darkness behind, Only its oscillation had any Meaning, any certainty, and my mind Traced the letters in that transitory Space between, pulsing from their charred ruin, The lit extinguished names end and begin.
Why was the white wall a memory I Had of my mother? Yet we are walking Beside it and within reach of its high White stone, rain is softer now and blurring Across illuminated names in York Road, and round us from every direction The wind is against us. We do not talk Because of it and I watch the neon Signs palpitating softly through the rain, Each time their light went out and the darkness Was left behind, the letters would remain Visible as shadows of her distress. ‘Walk close to the wall the wind will not blow Cold there’, and the night was neon’s shadow.
The pattern at night was always the same. This was a walk we had done so many Times before, when deserted streets became Unfamiliar yet nearer, and we Were as shadows watching and listening And moving as though in another world. Where gas light approaching and receding Over darkened windows, from glass was hurled On to reflected walls and vacated Rooms with the random of a betrayer, Before the clamouring crowd just ahead Or behind, protecting her pursuer. A fugitive endlessly fleeing through The city, through the nights my mother knew.
A paralysing fear toward midnight Would then descend on us while we waited For my father to return, and what might Happen was the source of her repeated Endlessly drawn out wondering. Nothing Could prepare her for its outcome, each night Nothing would halt or prevent the ending, And we never let him out of our sight, So that my mother could escape if she Had to, and we hung on his every word From the half-open door she had to flee Through when the raving stopped or went unheard In the silence of his lunge towards her, The stealth of his delirium after.
For as long as I could remember, my Mother walked at night unable to go Home. Sometimes she would knock on doors and cry For help, unable to ease her sorrow, And all the times she walked in Torre Hill She must have known that nothing would alter, The streets would be the same at night until Her children were grown up. And time after Was not in her thinking, there was only The time before and the time of the hour Of shadows when her spirit fled and she Slowly began to die and to cower From the fact that it made no difference To what he knew of her life’s existence.
For years I used to dream that you were still Alive, that your death was surely something We were told just to survive on until We saw you again., I kept on dreaming The same dream and when they ended you were About to die. I could not understand The years apart and you could not answer Anything, you were going to die, and In a dream and in the end all over Again, you told me how you had to go Away and how you lived your life after. How much I missed the years I did not know Her and all that time she was there and I Kept on asking her and answering why.
You are there with me by the white wall, we Are trying in vain to breathe together In the wind, in an early memory, And the quiet city is the colour And the fluctuating neon surface Of reflecting reverberating rain And a wind that sears your tears. And I trace The darkened letters after they remain Because I do not know how to help you, When the light comes back you are still afraid, Its vacillating rhythm pumping through The long arterial night, each inlaid Vowel is etched in its own black furrow And momentarily repeated shadow.
I walked to the crossroad from the Oakwood Clock almost thirty three years after your Death and our last journey anywhere. Would That it could have been other than before But nothing had changed, it was still the same, I was on the outside walking alone Through the same endless suburban terrain, And somehow I missed the door and its torn Note that you left behind. And while I stood At the crossroad the same panic came back, Every road led nowhere, which one should I take, which wrong turning was a way back. Then as now there was nothing left to say, I was stranded and I had lost my way.
There was no address and you were led there For nothing, but you left a half of her Note behind to become something to share With her, a future to remain after You had been. Within days you are leaving Your life behind and you stare for the last Time at my father, your mouth opening On a silent scream echoing a fast Locked silent world where you sit just before Him listening, knowing the money Will not be there, that the quarrel of your Departure was the fare for your journey. At the crossroad, following the wind’s track, At the last moment you would not look back.
You kept your silence for two years after The Hollies because you had to keep your Job as a nurse at all costs in order To feed your children, and there was no more Money coming in that was not spent on Alcohol and the progressive stages Of my father’s mania. Damage done That could not be undone, that assuages Nothing by virtue of his unknowing, He knew you were dying in pain slowly For two more years, and he went on drinking While you cleared the tables that surgery Left you alive for, and your sacrifice Was unerring, nothing else could suffice.
It is not enough how I long to leave It there, but the past calls out beseeching Me not to be afraid, how shall I weave The shortened unfinished days tapering In their endless night, out of the lost weft And the unknown anonymous life she Would have had. So many are the nights left Untold, pushed into an ordinary Agony or a day’s fleeting legend In the lives of those who refuse to see, For the darkness is endless and the end Is night’s fugitive passing destiny. ‘Lily Lily I feel out of this worrld’, The falling snow caught in his hair and curled.
There was nothing unusual about The quarrel, it was like all that had gone Before, my mother found herself without The money for her fare and with no one Else to ask but him. And it was morning And my father had a bad hangover From the night before, he sat there waiting To go to work, waiting just to see her Run away, but she remained there before Him as though transfixed in supplication And as though time was standing at the door And her journey had already begun. And to plead for her fare she spoke as once In profound and lacerating silence.
How much did she know as she sat there in The light of a soft September morning And waited for her journey to begin Knowing only that she would be leaving, Never to return or to see again The long arena of her suffering. And after, nothing was ever the same, It was not her departure that morning So much as the wild fixed grief of her face, A blackened rain slanting across slow time, A face not of this world, its last grimace As if my mother was no longer mine. As she stared straight ahead at my father It seemed as though time itself was over.
Here fare amounted to nothing, but while He was rowing in the endlessly drawn Out pattern of years, he knew that the trial Of words was about to end, almost worn Out as a black groove widens back before The laceration of recorded sound. And his words echoed back through the years or Outward ran as mercury to the ground, Something was broken, nothing would mend, But his words would last as long as they could. Love was never like this, and to the end Of his last syllable, mutely I stood Before her paralysed and listening. I who could have said so much, said nothing.
Suddenly there was a knock at the door And slowly out of nowhere a taxi Stopped and beckoned you to get in before The quarrel had become an unearthly Confusion and the interrupted sound But its own echo. No one seemed able To help you and while we scrambled around For a language that seemed insubstantial You forgot to care who saw you, and for The first time in your life you just went on Quietly weeping for all the world, or Simply yourself. A September sun Lit up the street and the morning’s attack, At the last moment you would not look back.
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