Camille Martin

Codes of Public Sleep

 

i.

 
a people speak from stony edges, urging linked memory native to crowd,
place effects in proportion to privacy, skin of native, an ambulatory balancing act as far as a musky smell
on a street naked from inside out.  skin of public, of converging theys disillusioned at a given time
in which a city breathes or one or two breathe, in time to common emotions.
ideas of an idea changing shape, unable to explain, only to point to an opening in a city in which voices enter
and thicken.  afterward bodies are there in that now again, hearts and heart pumping, float downward and crouch
on sidewalks.  a simple madrigal in the open promotes privacy in proportion to skin between air and air.
faint semaphores in a scripted opening shadow a city from self to self, to get a better crack at what’s unmarked,
to get a stony edge of skin to be translucent and slept in, naked scripted errors in that now, or some memories of an invention
of natural languages, mutually captured mutually open, unable to figure how to get back the same way
through parts of speech.  how is being one of them a common receptacle, holding to central colors, talking words
in the whole score.  given words, publics on loan, bridges in a manner of parceled space, draping
with now from body to body, sliding into, sliding out of, nickelodeons of merge sway verge,
interest approximating function holding to an average temperature.
above people’s heads streaming photons hide a man screaming obscenities to a street as an unknown point
in common space.  a casual excavation reveals an opacity of spreading light.  a man’s parts of speech in the open.
no place to sit.  speaking from a framework of outdoors, whether or not personal is more difficult.
tattooed membranes tumble down streets, common alphabets of bodies.  let streets decide
a symbolism of their hormonal movements.  each imagines its river at some moment, so it is both a sensation and an
opacity.  relations of colors trigger an exchange on a city’s raft.  how a person sees
a reverse of person in a telling of dark.  difference is contagious, birds in their nests in a parking garage.
examples surface where light is most diffuse, seeking a beacon or believing a public wound.  a person,
homeless and native, borrows a raft to sleep on.  steps on street’s surface, moving circulating blood outside silent
membranes, seeing together a circuitous sleep, laterally importing pleasure on estranged grounds.  sidewalks breathe,
each step reading signs aloud, soundwave effects of a place never equaling itself.  Despite walking and standing,
a person’s horizon creates a new instance of color, unheard-of feeling corresponding to a world’s water.
one’s river, too, is an unheard-of consciousness.  it is its own solvent.
 

ii.

 
molecules scatter at a slight gesture near a bus stop.  an invisibility of realms in words. one is named “flood.”
city is and is not dome.  perceptions hover in its branches, whose endings are convenient, say, a person defecating
in diffuse light.  citizenry informed of limits.  what words appear not from a defecating person and have emotions,
are a public perception.  so a watched street, both map and attention, remains empty.  neither crowd
nor person is framed, differences more like an undulating surface, or a slow motion struggle
in a dust cloud.  in floods of words chemically shifting aside a sky one thinks one among others perceives.  diaspora within
one and of a crowd reading signage on some edges of an excavation.  multiple chattering astride edges determines space
in its vicinity, at first a private assemblage of crumbling statues, then graffiti, obsolete and incalculable.  spaces
find their animals and texts, a back and forth determination that absorbs shapes of motions, making nests of openings
and tangible distances between ether and neurons.  one space opens into a continuity of bodies, multiple cognitions
in estranged motions of presence.  perception exceeds and is overdetermined by one’s gestures in a crowd.  one hesitates
continually in space in order to deploy memories of that space, like interdependencies of unmarked anticipations seeking
a balance of causes from inside out.  reciprocity of doubt and breathings from eye to eye, bus fumes
simultaneous with wind.
 

iii.

 
                                     a sound of a sound of jackhammers, linked
and also delicate air bubbles on sky surfaces’ thought.  soft booming shards audible, linked shapes of suffering
on a city’s skin.  replicating equal signs into doubt, a contagion of wounds dwindling and resurging, a replicable pattern
socially.  one is becoming audible within a people whose names exceed the limits of a city.  sounds of jackhammers
dreaming contradictory doppler effects.  space, once contested, erodes into public sleep.  a sleeping man
masturbates in a public library.  one whispers so as not to think an aura but to place its code. what’s not
known among open shelves.  illicit shadows for all within their range.  within that sleep blood finds a porous remembering
under a city’s wounded skin, seeking dialogue with gravity, while parts of speech rain, contested and contagious,
onto an umbrella stuck in the ground.  deteriorating walls erode well-meaning space.  traces of eroded space
link with the memory of a crowd.  the crowd is simultaneously estranged, which is its private aura
of seeing one another.  blindsight of common areas, extending selves into porous spaces crowds move to.  some signs
flow down metal grates where traffic moves in unscheduled stops.  whatever crowds remember, telling what
happened, is current in one’s mind.  so impossible to waste a porous public speech, urging the city of one self, empty
assemblage at converging stops.  pleasure where errors committed in parts of speech, in parts of persons’ public
exposure, here and there.  a map to stop walking in open nests and to be blind, relations of a convenient street at unknown
tellings, where to find what people remember.  a sign draws in divisible details.  a crowd’s translucent mind from street
to silent eye grounds the surprise of each step, in observed nests of distributed consciousness.  so that the difference
between projection and connectedness might not be coded outdoors, such as two thousand or so observable heartbeats.
one’s emotions alter the street’s colors and the equilibrium of the crowd.  a common wound of walking
in public, akin to stony and distributed madrigals.  a vacant building abandons the crowd.  its emotion of two
feral dogs licking the street is replicable and hormonally solvent.  empty space mutually observed
and extending a contradictory estrangement like metal gates and the memory of floods.  one’s private solvent
of air between the abandonment of space and self.  an excavation of sleep on the porous raft of a city.

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  (c)Camille Martin 2003