after Jean Donnelly, K Lorraine Graham, & Rod Smith Book Launch Party

Tony Mancus

to build a sound

of tearing the wait

from a body

of water

                        earth
                        salve

the punch of light
from behind us

what pouring is flung
and so a pre-set

emission of agreement
voicing in elemental phrases

what senses

are stripped

by oil

 

 

idea of volume
carried by shape

self as parsed
language and size

of print – what shoves
between the words

to believe the sirens
and the rocks

words inked from
their settle

police siren meant
so simple in the home

colors of the former
cedar – like the tree

had quit its job
one sounds the earth

out and it lets this
happen – how the mounds

let the weeds
go/grow – what’s dead

in them is dead
dead in us

and we’ll wreck
the hole of its best

felt shapes/

how the mouth

oil all on the ranks

the flit and stink

of what raises

itself before us

 

archetypes paid
to remain still

in all of time
how the markets all

 

whatever toy is simple and cranked

 

you stick the writing in where it fits                            or you don’t get done
with anything                                                              you so-and-so madness
                        a thumping sound in motion

the rule was to work toward vomit and sitting next to someone
lyricize the landscape or conception of self into it

no escape from the land or sound even a string

a set of fotos can slip into sense                                   word burn in the liquor of men
& smallish states built into the finery

all of the things to throw out of the body and the escape it’s playing at.
                                                            half a map and the O stuck in the near distance – how
in the blood is the blood, how the road and things slip
lump                                                                                                                foresting a wreck
            wall the carpet bunches again
                                                                        one fine point
                                                                        more

 

make the bees live alone
or live in the constructed                     put the human
model of the titanic to sink                 behind the screen
it – honey downed ice cap                   the ass in its full
                                                            moon hole

great collective death with family
            &what we make to laugh in public

 

but no commentary on how to see the words come together
the intimate as list and what a string of observations
can make exterior input & interior input matchsticks
how the internal shifts place – something fire generally
in the possible voice – document as sound being drafted
and coiled.

 

to put the force of faces together – am an argument, said
moving between the sound
                                                & then
                                                there are things

                                                like this                        I don’t make it
                                                up

here’s to experience you muppet-fucker

 

 

reading tactile – a threat/thread to repeat between words
column/volume shifting                      to stage
            a look
away.
the flock decided as some force – mute
                                                            to trip the step away

 

lock things up before you set them out
                                                the good house to be an add-on

leaning to the things that hold us – to make a horse a rider
                                                            to make
                                                            the horse
                                                            a word of habit
                                                            a word inhabited

the play with what is sprinkled in as aside
            house – no house like it, no siree
                        hope you keep it
                        up

 

‘I throw out my head as fast as I can’                                      ‘there is nothing that is not
                                                                                                appropriation’

ruminate on the sounds of robotics – the gem like construction of what hovers above us
the stop motion animation of our commercial childhoods

all the things to collectively hate and what happens after it dies.

you can put it on what you agent for. you can put it on what you forget – the only genius
is the room.

hit the nearest line with all your face | you dig it in the dark

accumulation and thinking to almost nonsense – and then strung together sense – what makes nonsense and input of all the sources become noise until it is not that.

 

 

 

bitten off the faucet
to snare with a phrase, to start and stare
is one way to be afraid

wrote the poem where
all the pieces came apart and we were whispering
about ET and nobody ever came home again

the field was dusk
it was a field and it was also
a number of other contagions

to place the phrase in the dark
to race against
what emphatically can be stated, then recalled

to the mouth like a fountain
to the moth like its dust
a certainty in programmatic language

to wonder if the train can be made to go anywhere else
what the tracks’ regrets amount to is a whole forest
and even the caves