words

often in the night i can hear him call out,
i don’t know to whom.

his restless heart beats in an endless struggle
against the confines of whiskey bottles
and pain killers and solemn opinions and
all other manner of maddening things.

a father who once held death in his hands
like a black-haired reaper,
in quiet disposition slung over his shoulder
as if it weighed less than all the world,
spitting fire and opium-driven commands
to decimate all manner of foreign faculty
with the savagery of old testament vengeance.

the years of then now a memory he cannot dismiss,
he has tried to destroy that part of himself,
to rid the world of that part of itself,
to reverse the action of things once committed
can never be undone,
but like the markings of ancient men
those things are writ in stone.

-S.C. Martinez