Explore "Psychology from Mars" by Maxwell Bodenheim on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
/ Torban flattered the details / Of his festival in brown -- a beard -- / With fingers that held a musical length, / And spoke of psychology. / The clever reproduction / Of a human being, / His appearance lacked / A hairsbreadth of reality / And barely failed to convince. / His eyes, assemblages of planets / Miraculously dwarfed, were small / But did not hold the shifting gluttony / Common to little eyes. / His lips were unsubstantial fibres / And the straight line of his nose / Gained an unearthly sincerity. / His body was muscular but failed to reveal / The smug delusion of superiority / That lives within physical strength. / With a voice in which pity and satire / Mingled bewilderedly with each other, / He spoke of psychology.
/ "Normal and average men / On Mars are charged with being / Insane and distorted oracles. / Because they desire to resemble each other / We force them to live together / On drably elaborate plateaus. / There they fashion cities -- / Geometrical madness / That censures shreds of dread and unrest / Within the spaces of its heart. / There they retreat to farms, / And the disciplined exhaustion / Of their lives reclines upon / Monotonous rewards known as harvests. / They cling to homes -- slumbering alcoves / Plentifully supplied / With complimenting mirrors / And altars for the mind. / Sometimes a revolution / Seduces their living flatness, / And an original confusion / Follows rumours of creation, / But the sanity vanishes / Into the marching unison / Of their repentant madness.