words

the warmth consumes, it envelopes
your spine like a virus
and you have let it in,
the feline presence of your womb
this pale november flesh it sheds,
the towers of your yesterday
yield emptiness, empty
of the heart and empty of the hand,
the brother welding to your home
a line that cannot be broken,
a stake that cannot be unearthed,
the depth perception of your words
spread about like feigned interest,
like waves it has returned
from a shore you can’t recall,
an island cannibal tribe
that has sold the secrets of your work
and swallowed the wealth
of your undertaking,
in emergency rooms
the memory of your shiver
clings to those walls
and to those paper beds,
you were not alive but you
were nearly dead, the months that followed
a hazard of faith and false vestige,
clinging to the remnants of a world
your father created with his bloody hands
and sad eyes, the broken back of his labor
the wings of your promise,
your clean feet above the ground
and free of all the normal weights
that dragged the others about,
that held them to the anchors
of their own strange genetics,
the wildness of your eyes
reflected deep within the strangeness
of your spirit,
like the buffalo you have used it entire
and like the buffalo you have faded.

-S.C. Martinez