words

like moths aflame within,
some terrible reflection of their burning selves
draws them to the light,
a false mirror,
an empty gesture,
a memory genetic in prose
of some greater time when such transgression
was noble and with purpose,
all things of dead rhetoric
as they bounce off the glass.

like lions consumed by their own,
the irony of such things not lost
in their fading vessels,
their spilled viscera,
their spoiled eyes
soon no stars nor suns shall occupy,
inglorious the method to their tragedy,
these kings deposed by a nameless law
no beast can escape.

like men lacking witness
to their own becomings,
no ledger to recall this moment from any other,
without mothers or fathers,
born of the earth itself
they come issuing forth from caves
and rivers and graveyards,
empty of the mind and the heart
they can never become
without the barest of memory to scrape from,
all forms alike in their end,
all things the same throughout.

-S.C. Martinez