Two Poems by Richard Martin

An Attempt at Couch

I’ve dismissed cell phone trees as underweight

Beyond the legal limit of height

This is a poem with a plot

The form of the plot is the line

The reader understands the setting is the imagination –

The branch of consciousness that creates the world

There are rocks and soil in the margins of thought –

The house of a celebrity after a mudslide

The intention of the writer is to take an afternoon nap

With the cat

Language is the main character

It precedes the starting gun of the spacetime continuum

Words ignite stars

Being is an ontological term not a fire extinguisher

Who we are is a question language must address

There are suppers and candlelight dinners for culture and exegesis

How quaint in an era of digital takeout and restrictions on caloric absorption

Still there are reasons to talk and rename the enterprise of being here

Words are not fools

They have the stomach to consider past present and future roles

Take the rich for example

They turn words into telecommunication companies for profit

Can you hear me now

Talking heads multiply like fish and report on the state of the world

The ability to record and watch 15 TV programs at once is an industry standard

I’m feeling sleepy in the chaos of choice and debilitating action

Denouement has me by the balls

So the plot not of the poem but of the plot is a cast of villains

Who controls whom for material advantage and gain
See it now on Xbox Live

Side Effects

1

All

medications cause

depression I may

be in a bar

talking with a stranger It

has been a week of intellectuals

in plastic bags and the karma of

retribution The movie deal is off the table

The summit of the powerful canceled due to the

weather It snows on Jupiter if you believe in lies

There are various things in my wallet I can track my

packages by telepathic numbers open up a small restaurant with parking receipts

There was the day you mistook my mind for a carnival I spoke

in small boats and rabid colors Lights flickered I gave up on Thomas Edison

before you Candy apples and Ferris wheels without a predicate There is an abandoned mining

town in my sentence structure In the grass a supple flag monitors the action We knew

each other through the love beads stolen by the aristocrat I arrived at the watering hole with

a gold tooth and hall pass Reality stalks perception By the time I got through high school the

author was dead Victims of the ego clashed with victims of the ego Night pranced across the

field of

2

sleep

_________________________________

Note: "An Attempt at Couch" appears in Martin's 2016 book Techniques in the Neighborhood of Sleep.

Richard Martin is the author of Dream of Long Headdresses: Poems from a Thousand Hospitals, White Man Appears on Southern California Beach, Modulations, Marks, boink!, Altercations in the Quiet Car, Under the Sky of No Complaint, Buffoons in the Gene Pool (Lavender Ink /Fell Swoop, 2016), and Techniques in the Neighborhood of Sleep (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016).

Links
www.lavenderink.org
www.spuytenduyvil.net