Desire without power. Desire without talons. Or: desire as a performance of talons, as talons on leather gloves, as the desired groping of toxic materials: as the enclosed space where we watch and WATCH THE OTHER WATCH and watch ourselves watching and the blue cloud rises like a formless dirigible, like the innards of watching leave us and hover like a disembodied skull down streets, past bodegas and porn shops, past errant street performers and patches of grass stuck with the bodies lounging on towels in the sun; the deeper we go, the deeper the tunnel; the deeper we breathe, the untethered camera; the deeper I look, the broken contract; the harder we fuck, the orphic coma; the deeper subway of red lights and bodies lying on broken glass and the smell of liquor and bodily fluids and Axe Body Spray and lights without origin and moist newsprint and rats decaying and an repugnant witness laughs and unwitnesses and walks away...
 
Watch this motherfucker.

I have been seen.

​I have been seen and depressed and been pressed against an LCD display with the talentless smudges of grubby men with unclean nails and flaccid cocks and felt no language, verbal or not, grunted or not—all red lights and blue bodies and red lights and blue bodies breaking themselves up in blue light and being broken and seen and made and unseen and made like imagined bones on a wrinkled bed. Projected sheets. Unseen talons.

​Marty Cain is a poet / video artist and the author of Kids of the Black Hole (Trembling Pillow Press, 2017). His work appears (or is forthcoming) in Fence, Tarpaulin Sky, Jacket2, Deluge, Gigantic Sequins, TAGVVERK, and elsewhere. Currently, he edits Garden-Door Press with the poet Kina Viola, and is pursuing a PhD at Cornell University, where he studies experimental poetry and the pastoral.