words

there is a wildness on the street,
a leopard mentality of machinery
and mathematics devised
to replace spoken word with
that of the phantom tongue,
the mind’s rhetoric devoid of purpose.

a miserable assortment of movement
from here and back again,
endless the call to arms
of fat eyed malignance that draws
on wasted breath, call it what it is,
an excess of baleful moments,
incontinent to the bone
the hand that draws the weapon.

the world slick with rain,
the red light reflection
like blood omens
in the natural order of things,
the brown withered hand
of nature in her lonely recourse,
the lost cause of living
a faded project in the hands
of failed contractors in white collars,
digging the graves of progress
with a passive indifference to all else.

it is what it is,
the gaping maw of everything
delivered forth like an elder subrogate
forced into this lament
wild and reeking of defiance
with eyes that follow every turn
the true pattern of fixity.

the conqueror, the victors,
men with bloodstained memories
and hearts that no longer retain
within them the compassion
for any other, alone but for
the company of greed,
like terrible transgressions
against the most basic of all law,
they have devoured the milk of
her age and consumed her breast entire,
no words to recall the ancients,
no reversing the knowledge of what can be done.

-S.C. Martinez