words

goddamn the words won’t come
and the silence is death,
the emptiness is murder,
the vein is transparent
and the night burns slow
like a cigarette
but the words won’t come,
women move away
and the sun spits fire,
i can feel its reach
through and through the earth,
the streets are peopled with scarecrows
and garish whores with dollar sign eyes,
fishnet and leather skin
and painted sinister grins,
china eyes and needle wounds,
clowns from some awful sister world,
bearers of the universe without
and the way things will come to be,
dragging their wares there and back
calling drunkenly to the night
the names of the dead
who have gone here before,
this is the burning town
in my head, the madhouse paradigm
by which all outer elements are judged
and sorted by no order than the lack thereof,
i am the avatar of naught,
confection of discarded materials,
lacker of words,
bearer of wet thoughts,
keeper of abandoned conquests
slowly fading
from the collective,
the heart,
the order,
the night.

-S.C. Martinez