Tom Hibbard

 


Assent 2

"in the stone city"
--Trakl

look at the eagerness
  the fair treatment
 not turning to the right or the left
  quickness
 to stand with the oppressed
was uninsistent Statue of Liberty
 despondent about
  the number of repairs today
was gigantic industrialization
 pressing in
around the reflection of inanimate cattails

you aren't supposed to
  overhear the air
 obtaining possessions
   only as stolen
 harming the exclusive quality
  going somewhere else
      covert push-ups oppose
  the same thing
put in the open
  with its updated
   completely inaccurate forecast

O stark improbability
 teetering on the antiseptic edge
   fill up your avowed program
 you cannot stop the curb's
  warranted shortage
   clutching tenderness' demise
  crammed into jewelry boxes
 hoarding right and wrong
  George Herbert Mead
   outlined only as weakness
  you urged the waters
   you brought roped-off shafts
   into suggestiveness
   in the confusion of fasting
in the confusion of enumeration

insurgents what good are your weapons
 against development of multiple personalities
  calling everything illustrious
 trying to take over
  chicken breasts
your highschool alertness
 your indiscriminate nationalism
  that's running away not staying
 that resists everything
that can't allow an unthreatened thought
 you strangle the base
 the invisible root of societies

perhaps someday you would like
 to put up the wrong type of siding
  focused on county fairs
 not convinced anymore
   by unwitting emotion
  bleak humid August
 you can't do anything right
  you didn't quite hear
 I was going to do that later
served meals of rings
  not allowed to eat fat
 I give in to the impulse
  to descend to distracting
   ramshackle depths
 the good abstaining from sex
  persevering in submitting
  the dented request
  after two hundred years
 the Anti-Christ will come
  the health of the body itself
   turning to illness
  eventually giving without war
   each day's front steps
    sending well-equipped messengers
  to the plagiarized banquet
until twinkling papyrus vanished

these are all the bones that ever were
 142 billion in graves
  not caked together
 or going on and on
  Hegelian revolt of the dead
   ends the violent
 Age of Covat-Rex

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