Marten Baxter

See it all

To see the world in a grain of plastic
traveling through a human vein,

bunging up a seabird’s guts or
glacier-baiting artic plains. To see

a dire warning wolf sliding into
your GMs: a console’s Save Game

respawn point, the dawning of
an absolute complete Jurassic fuck up.

To see the sea
before you saw the sea, alive

with fever, human waste and tatty
influenza flotsam nodding in the heaving waves.

To see.

To see to see to see to see a list
Of babies’ names so long you can’t believe

that you’ve still only got to
“three. years. old.”

And the video’s from a year ago
but none of them will get to four or

get to play or laugh or cry or try
the stupid boring glory inconsequential

priceless wonder taste & touch &
love & loss & simple joyous stuff of life.

Is to see it all a duty or
a privilege or a penance or a starting

point or ending or impossible to look
at or impossible to look away or just

another image on a laptop in a bedroom
on a landmass on a planet

round a dwarf star in a universe where everything
is nothing and the possibles are endless

and the darkness keeps on growing
in the silence, in the silence, in the silence—

Marten Baxter (they/them) is a queer mad writer, musician, and recovering academic. Their work explores relationships with the more-than-human world as well as mental health, gender & sexuality, and political upheaval & resistance. They have work published or forthcoming in Carmen et Error, The Dawntreader and the collection Wild Words. @baphomart.bsky.social

Marten wrote the following about his poem:

There’s an unavoidable whiff of End Times in the air these days. Like a lot of people, I get overwhelmed by the wealth of horrendous things going on in the world, variously under- and over-reported in the media. The first draft of this poem arrived in a breathless splurge after accidentally reading the news in bed one morning and gathered up extra despairs and rages as it went along. Reworking Blake’s opening to Auguries of Innocence was, I hope, an appropriate and grimly playful way to start my own piece.