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Manifesto: Perception/Distance

Ensemble
of feeling when one is
    within

thinking / perception
    of a wheel
a grey rose

coming from someone
    else's machine
or

the fear that thought feeling has of its
    counterpart

    and on the screen
institutions

with colored flags

and eviscerating melodies /
    looking to see where the collective will go
        bright peach

enumerated under ruby rings
    that hold up

        the sky's brightest tunnel

the alphabet of groundedness
    escaping into the glasses that sit waiting to be washed
        the radio and the songs we sing
            of casting off into new epics

they're not really about anything
    but there's a love story embedded in them

the library guarded by lions
    holds up the edifice of the building

where seals learn to dance with balloons
    and gravity is more than a concept




Various ensembles of gravities / the pictures we have
of the world are made of its light
    the weightless wash

that time

blinks out into
    the clock making its vicissitudes

of modernity into
    the dance of feathered metonyms

which is subtended by the now open door
    thrown wide open at the end of the handles
 the geography of the country     out of maps

in which we insert mirrors
    getting a better feel for the people for the trees for

languages /

where the light is
    before blue the adjectival television
        telling the news



Ensemble of the painter at the door

making his philosophy of sex
    into something unrecognizable

taking out the gem clips from books
    taking out the pearl clip from his lover's red hair



Ensemble of the obvious
shattering of the rhizomatic mouse

hiding in modesty
hissing in the back of the dark woods

and somewhere there's another poem about this or am I just remembering wrong

the phenomenological dusk
    in the architect's Book One
        of lemons

and open prairies
    and Coke bottles

receding stats
    and military strategies

of sky
    with its stones

and bright non-exist
    "feathered out of the sky now"



Ensemble

of the distinctions between felt thought and thought feelings / maybe it's at the soul of the
film
the vast affinities

we create for ourselves
high-resolution hotels

the pinpricks in the tintype
mediate    the oblique stories of the buildings we
love as we love our lives



Ensemble of the body in its pain / and how can one know what another feels?
    the elsewhere in the kitchen
        takes his coffee

for reconstruction, makes sutures
    from a quiet fire

and
    still...



Laura Carter is a writer and teacher living in Atlanta. Recent work is forthcoming in Hambone.
Picture
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