words

my sordid company
your fellowship awaits.

this island moves about me
and the waves from the world without
refuse to subside,
bringing these criminal winds
i struggle to recuse.

a recluse from the world of others,
their thoughts, their griefs,
their panic is mine
and this island
can go no further out
before the ocean ends.

this place troubles my heart,
this place like all places,
there is a choking
in the air you breathe
and i see through
the facade of everyday squalor
into the depths of common madness,
the broken string,
a minute hand rocking back and forth
on a single breath,
a pause in the earth’s toiling,
as if this has all rendered before
some resonance of the first life,
skipping, skipping,
skipping second to second
and back again
here in this bed,
these blue sheets,
this black ink.

this constant felonious muttering,
those words i birthed
that fell dead in my hands
before they were so much
as a scratch in stone,
now here the night again
and one must draw in to question
the very nature of these things,
of time and space
and the old nations
of biblical conspiracy,
whether these words are of use
or merely non possibilities,
to pass hour after woeful hour
before reaching out
and pulling handfuls of stars
from out their stations.

i have seen the night for what it is
and like a lunatic i have counseled
with the agents of its recourse,
i have watched this naked wine
clamor down the dark gullet
of celestial throats,
still they withhold,
still they refuse to unveil
the secrets of their endless charting
from one theory to the next.

-S.C. Martinez