H _ N G M _ N #3.

poetry, poetics &c.

Tony Tost

from Complex Sleep

Trace the following down, pulling it on, putting on airs. Tracks are here for the scope, images for a beautiful & imported sleep. Preternatural earrings. The fashioned & the executed are within. Perpetually now my central loyalties are made partial, combed down. Star marked by interior textures, coats filling a room, garden gone to seed : bad moves. Eclipse cumulative. Small mall dissolving. Stillness on the phone, tell me how love is succeeding. Soon enough exploit the healing. Hymns for lining & prayer : if you do not understand the words please do not moan along. Presence disappoints, mowing alone, pulling away from the waters. Spark persistent enough, in its vision, rising. Stabbing the star, did you put on airs, insisting as you do, on notions of form? Capabilities, soft surrealisms & basic human desires are also strong in here. Sound of one tribe clapping. Multiplicity of brotherly love. Orb'd into a shadowed unity dispersed throughout its showing a final period is an error : its lone invention. Metaphysical, I fell like this, into the well. Hallucination is interesting in my manner : because of these exaggerations more subtle truths may be detected & finally tracked down. Of symmetry I know a cluttered night with a white flag lifting, & correspondence. An anger mixed into the track for now. Elementary relatives play their role, as air for the sentence. Speech has always developed well along coastlines, in rebuttal. Specificities of the best of times. A night spent sweating, punctuated discussions of discursive traps. Support so the first writing is a complex writing. A sentence I can deal with : the predetermined areas expand into something beyond a beyond. Revealed : my determination is simple & settled : I am no longer your child climbing onto a goat's back. Call & response of your extremist wing. Still, the sun god must be united with something other than skin. Notice face's music, asleep in dead laws. Such small gestures make a reception memorable. Before the city uttered or was quoted by riots : I walked onto the plane under the shrill moon, pierced & glad, demanding some sort of victory (I felt sad as I saw the fires below). Misunderstanding my negotiations as narratives, my family applauded the bottom line. To sky is not to wander or lord over but to blend cunningly (O Lord) the one & the many. Unanswerable : the phrase has eyes. Of my genealogy I know this : there are chairs arranged throughout the acres, released. Genealogies checking themselves in exodus, "enacted through the flesh." Sensibility like a saint, marching through. Strange then this repose, a trick of the trade. Rock in hand I contemplate a past (a window in the shape of a serpent) too intimate to forgive, an agent of theft & release. Assimilated into the design, closure becomes good news, disappearing & coalescing amongst efficient minds. Themes skillfully acknowledged I erase my brother as a furnace from the page. Annunciation without appointment. Is the south rising again tonight, through the turnstiles? Into the heartland my hours descended. In my hour of deliberation the ventilator turned off & on : this was like sleep : desirable. Model airplane & a kite on the unmade bed. Prone & desirable my wife was there, a nice figure on the unmade bed. To present fine things to your wife on your way down is standard. Virtue is always understated (isn't it? isn't it?). Forth as froth : whether in or out of sleep I lust for the flexible, the feline, the cinema of the anemic. Drama is a form of sincerity : serious praise for time & space. Simultaneous & unsolicited, my submission to you is complete. Wounds marked by interior textures, meat on the scales. Imagination disciplining the state, allowing it to blot out at work the sun with its body an agent of practical value & not just of uprising. As I stiffened in the down I grew imprecise pretending to be entire in the middle of nowhere. Investigating the noise I discovered that it was in fact a picture (possibly in color) that had been framed & nailed to my wall. Exaggeration at this point would only be an aesthetic affirmation of the current regime. Off in the minutes : an arabesque around which the children gathered carrying blood. Sight follows motion (mention). Illuminations weakening by degrees : I'm getting by on winding resolutions (sharply re-mastered). Gifts : general drunkenness, a rope, the living drone, a crushing landscape, mother on the phone. Conversational, the officer's intelligence allowed nature in : we drove home, fully aware. Trade routes are traditional channels of cultural transmission, erogenous zones where stances of submission & domination are developed. Riddles signify interruption, the misplacing of keys. Of my past I know it is time to wipe the shit from my shoes. Evening now & the storm is as anticipated a drainage of power : hiding beneath the bed we find that communication consists of making a face & then holding it for hours. Wood collected, spared : to prefer always the living is to favor a tree simply because it is on this side of the river. Meant river said river. Warbler, all the lilies have wilted. Host unfamiliar, the quiet whispering is writing a book I cannot stand. Wisdom's portrait is apparently finished. Archeologist, all the knowing is overheard (overhead). Beast who has come to be returned has come to be denied : exhaustion ritualized. Mimicocracy of the old school building a better tomorrow without cessation. & what recurrent sighing is in our capacity, what whimsical perspectives? Pre-information progresses downward into objective data (just passing through). Overemphasis cohering into a consistent perspective. Bulge at the business end of the three-headed dog. Wolf I raised why do you get like you do, so below? Characteristic explanation, "there is no present except the one demanded by your histories." Dead there is nothing inevitable. Serendipitous world shadow, black leader : you are a moving picture, an imbalance of light accomplished by that full fleeing of an other whom we designate as missing : this does rely upon an acceptance of the body : a consideration of decomposition . . . of proportion's responsiveness : inner traps are set for exterior predators : plus this (pulse this) : the transition of light to language is created in each person shaping him or herself in the shadows. Pound one's heritage : weigh it : color it in & out. Finer yet : explain these things to the hangman. Heart played victoriously in a visible Hell . . . added to creation . . . do not forsake me. Record of complexity, I never asked for the truth. Sleep on the sentence (sleep on the roof).


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