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Three Poems by Chris Martin I AM NOT A CINEMATOGRAPHER Winter has grown Late, intrepid Profiles momently Gracing the construction Barrier with weightless charm, a nearly Chinless woman flashes me Her smile only to withdraw it, seeing That I too am headed West, I feel as if I stare at women All day long, a byproduct of my being Alone all night, so down 24th Street I go, casually flitting From gallery to gallery, Cicely Brown Surprisingly mute while further Along I am greeted with a pleasantly ribald Exhibition of buxom lady pirates, all The while anticipating the purloined sandwich In my bag, a thing Which pleases Me greatly, as does the birthmark On the bridge of the nose Of the girl in the deli Buying a Diet Pepsi, like I said I don’t want to die A sad pervert, but I’m not yet ready To apologize for the undirected Throbbing of my peptides, my annoyance Growing at the protracted twitter Of Japanese teenagers making their way To Madison to shop And make phone calls and soon I am mired in the intricacies Of public space, knee to hand, eye Taking in a mouth as it talks almost Disembodied, a woman’s narrow Currinesque Nose bifurcating the slope Of her chest, you do not make sense Of it, you make conversation, even alone These little interjections Of desire tipple at the eyes’ wet Scan, which is not to say I am like an actor Who ends up resembling The characters he’s played, I am Not even a cinematographer wrenching Beauty from an otherwise Dumb panorama, I am that dumb Panorama, the trees, windows The very avenues themselves and you Are the camera, both of us Caught in the dizzying, phenomenal Interchange as it Zooms like an electron Between our shells, bouncing Jaggedly, so that One might run One’s mouth forever, lips Flapping like a moth Full of blood and never quite pin It down, our wants so Jubilantly bent on parallax Our wishes always scurrying Vague for fear of being Irreversibly misconstrued By a capricious god, tearing Our hair out over the arbitrariness Of it all, the fact That you could get everything you ever Wanted and find that you Aren’t that you anymore, as if we Were truly able to live suspended In the stale breath of a nail Fashioned space, all that’s left Is to find something impossible And spend your life trying To accomplish it, we are constantly on Trial, our bodies break, our needs Consume us, I see A darkness and I can’t believe How strange it is to be anything at all. RHINOCEROS I was born in the middle Of the end of A decade in the middle Of the end of A century, my fingers Always slightly Shaking, holding them Out to the various people I am Thinking to love The people who sit me Down, explain How very inside of it I am, charging, a thought Bubble blotted Woodpecker red, the come Down of our terrifying Anatomies as four Hands thoughtlessly clutch At the flash an airplane Casts across the lawn, sky Cloudless, noise Sudden as every twelve minutes Or so the shadow Solemnly passes, a squabble Of birds igniting amongst The flickered blades of the lawn This is how language Malingers harmless things, each being busy Dreaming in their sliced self Self-portrait skin, the painting reads PAY FOR SOUP, BUILD A FORT, SET THAT ON FIRE The song sings most Of my fantasies are of making someone else Cum as the homeless man Sweats sleeping beneath the unbudded arms Of the cherry tree on the esplanade Where I too lay, my head on The stomach of a dark-haired girl Who says I’ve been coagulating My whole life it seems Only to dissolve, to speed Sleep, dream, and thaw. from Fantastic Autopsies 2 One falls into all the confusions of an equivocal language, the body moves eye disappears without preparing We perceive that which exceeds us, sparrows congregate on the clothesline, our arms grasp each other’s backs and our stomachs bulge to touch one another at the point of their turning inward From you I see a desert which holds everyone in their inconceivable lateness Brooklyn here but myself remembering the skeleton of a two-headed calf named Spider, the crowd fevered with visitations, the clouds lured with infantile pinks, hues tricking us into volume 17 If refuse is the refuge of time If philosophy is music with content If one has a duty to reveal impossibilities I still want to be real as a hamburger It’s February for the third time two loves later drinking coffee at noon under doused neon the girl behind the counter exposes the match-sized gap between her incisors teeth are said to erupt When Brakhage films the bodies disorganized he is disallowed to display their faces What is the value of a face? A man is said to live by his tooth When Xavier is a table I don’t understand why the chair doesn’t kiss him When Marina becomes a part of the gun she is not the one that stops the performance Naturing cadences of joy is not painless—break open my tooth like a fortune cookie | ||||||||||||
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