words

the world casts a smile
about that painted face,
this midnight leper a lesson
of some other then,
a warning for some more present now.

look at me from across the road,
from beneath the shadow,
appear before me as a word
lacking some common definition,
something of a parable
unwritten by the hand,
genetic prose within the mind.

your foreign shiver in the night,
your wretched lumber through the dark,
you feared the message contained within
a heartbeat and like some failed
vestige of that permanent order
you did succumb to the wickedness
of your own labor,
the paralytic laughter of such hilarity
not lost on the patients of that fatigue.

you phantasm, you spectral cancer,
i have smelled your rotten odor
and i have consumed your wasted flesh,
i have chased you through the damp
of morning and into the sundown
of the evening, and still
you have eluded me like some
thing unreal and without substance,
like a dream or a fantasy
or some other reason for this.

-S.C. Martinez