"There Will Be a Very Meaningful Picture Here" by Chris Martin

In the recurring caveman
Dream I wear my meat vest
And I love you, the whites

Of our eyes gleaming
Like cleanly picked bones as we sit
Beside our fire, the one that

Allows us to think
Outside predation and weather
And I wonder

If I would have the time
To love you otherwise, a thought that
Unsteadies me horribly, like

Yesterday, in the hands
Of the pear-shaped Russian
Hairdresser, the way

She sylphlike peered
At me in the silent glass
Of the mirror, her

Clicking scissors slipping
Behind my ear and I wanted
To sleep in her terrible

Black pupils, this is what hair cuts
Mean to me, I am as a beast
Dressed in the guise of a boy, I wish

For a small, ardent thing
And am throttled by
The lung-crushing collapse

Of my own desire as it comes
Into being, which is
Why I prefer the hallucinations

Of Neanderthal life, days
Spent inching
Boulders from the ridge

Where below a pitching pack
Of mastadons tread trumpeting and nights
Where my dream

Within    my    dream    is of riding
The mountainous
Eromotherium, a creature

Whose yawning bellow fills
Forests where birds once ruled
The earth, but we, luckily

Have no such ambition, plastic
Bags drift in the bare
Arms of trees we know

Not the names of, a sunlit
Satellite dish dithers
Next to a still, iron weather vane

And we sleep in an old bed, our fire
Crumbling down to embers, your hand
Probing for morsels in my stiff

Knotted hair, I remove
My meat vest and I love
You, our bulbous

Noses flickering in the ash-flecked night.

 
"There Will Be a Very Meaningful Picture Here" from American Music by Chris Martin. Copyright © 2007 by Chris Martin. Published by Copper Canyon Press.