Mark Young

This Time The Heart Is Electronic Music

I lie on my side on the examination
couch, left arm stretched upwards,
a mirror image of the Statue of Liberty
but without her drapes & torch. Instead
I am covered with electrodes, attached
to various portions of my upper torso.
By straining my neck slightly I can
watch the monitor; &, as the nurse
moves the greased roller ball across
my chest, I see the valves of my heart
opening & closing, opening & closing,
like kissing fish. Then the ECG kicks
in. It becomes a multimedia show,
sound waves displayed across the
bottom of the screen like subtitles to a
foreign movie & a solid bass line that
tells me I am well enough to dance to it.

Scar Tissue

We cannot leave emptiness alone,
even a space so small it is
beyond most common definitions.

Who knows the provocation for such
actions. Start large, & there's
certainly ancestral memories —
agoraphobia controlled by inventing
animism, filling in the gaps by
ascribing godhood to everything in
sight & gods to everything beyond.
Start small, learning as schoolchildren
by seeing blood or pond water under
a microscope display such levels of
intricacy that we automatically allocate
to all such spaces, even those we
cannot see, an infinite number
of inhabitants. It used to be a metaphysical
conundrum, determining how many angels
danced on the head of a pin. Now it's
called neutron flux, & we have invented
machines to measure it, but use the
language of Dada for description.

Phonoms, leptons, quarks & quasars —
these words were all originally Tzara's.

 

Recent poems by Mark Young have appeared or are to appear in Word For/Word, Die Leere Mitte, Home Planet News Online, experiential-experimental-literature, Utsanga.it, Hamilton Stone Review, & BlazeVOX, amongst other places.