words

one night i sat on the edge of the world,
the great blackness of space before me
interrupted by pinpricks of light beyond that cover,
i turned estranged with their presence
and began to put out the stars and planetary bodies
with the ends of my fingers.

into the early morning i made work of this,
balanced on the earth like some failed atlas
before lying to rest along the spine of himalaya.

i awoke the evening following and commenced my task
with a diligence greater still
than the hand that placed them there to begin with.

at the end of the third dawn
there were no cosmic eyes to speak of,
the night now perfect and whole, and then i did sleep.

sometime later the moon crept up out of that abyss
and ashamed at having forgotten it,
i grabbed that sphere from out its orbit
and hurled it deeper into outer space,
its destiny from that moment onward
blind and unknown, then at last we were in peace,
the night and i lovers locked in a timeless covenant.

the planes then mocked my solace, claiming the skies their own
when i had worked to hold that black substance alone,
then they too had to be released from their cause
and with the slightest effort i crushed them from the heavens
until there were none left nor would they dare to raise up more.

the solitude, the deepest isolation of those nights that followed,
my rage subdued then grew and turned against me,
tethered to my heart and my hands like spirited shackles
till i yearned for the company of all i had banished
and turned nomad in the face of insanity, rumbling across the earth
with a lust born of instinct, tearing up whatever lay in my path
like some derelict architect destroying what others had built,
i claimed all things mine by right of my desire to own them
only to discard them as if their existence threatened mine.

the only star i had not defeated lay eager above all sight,
calling me to relieve it from such ancient woe, the gravity
of the universe never letting such things be free.

i held the sun there in the palms of my hands
and brought it closer, setting myself down to weep at its presence,
to bathe in that light i had forsaken, and it dried up my tears
and the oceans and all things alike, till there was nothing left
but i and the sun, falling through space like outcasts of all law,
and then it did burn out and i fell alone into that void i had created,
cradling in my blackened hands the only vestige of my ever having been.

-S.C. Martinez