words

leaves turning in strange revolutions
in the wind in the dark in the night,
skittering across all manner of surfaces
like things accustomed to such modes of flight,
like things articulating themselves
only in the absence of witness
and bonding to only their own relevance,
the hushed tones of their cascading,
things bereft of meaning or order
joining their cackled scrapings
to one another and again only,
derived from terrors nameless
and unreal to any but the dead,
the black tunneling of souls gone ahead
through utter vacuous space
as wormholes in cosmic poetics,
deranged as all proxies of hell
in their wicked loping,
turning and turning
the veined bones of their skin
crude fans in such spiral conjecturing,
things not real,
things only held in dreams or madness,
undocumented by any hand but mine
in this troubled ideation
to join form with abstract,
these words from this head
crumbling softly like leaves
turning in strange revolutions
in the wind in the dark and in the night.

-S.C. Martinez