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Soliloquy #1
Submission Techniques
"The Form"

(untitled)
- David H. Sutherland




This poem starts slow, slow like a barge rifting wake or
a starfish meta-sizing under a noonday sun.

It has no syllabus of change or schedule,
slow to itself as its thinker thinks;

if I desire the grossest of metaphors, as a poet, first
let me devour this strange mirror of words for a body,

the long cadenced cheeks and fleshy hips half chiseled
half scrawled. Teased by pen let the letter find its nape

write its torso of chilling seconds and edits. If not of the Will,
then there is no difficulty in what there is to be.

Let the prodigious state of page or analogy worth revising
turn its figurations, its powerful sentence even firmer to its call.

Give it breath, but only twice in a minute, keep its
constant surrendering to a constant din of experience intact,

for by divine right no wish of my own can be absolved
in a passage whose unnatural thoughts are these hauntings,

so before I cradle myself off to sleep, there'll be this poem,
this slow sounding poem, that ends with a whine.



16 Renford Road (four)
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