words

a deep atavistic cold war is growing,
in my veins the malevolent conflict
of old terrors with new remorse,
as if my very nature is enslaved
by its own keeper,
the talons of my youth,
explosions within the battlefields
of my drunken heart,
in jungle encased in the withered arms
of monolithic trees like fossilized limbs
of petrified giants,
in desert swimming the sands
like an other world amphibian outcast
tracing tandem suns with exotic marble eyes,
in sea bearing salt-laden burden
and wavering crests of self that crash
from shore to shore in the endless squall,
in sky raining hell on all manner
of ant life below in their intrepid pursuit
of things that bear not reason,
defaulted to the only order
that is in all creatures
down to the least,
hidden within their paper wings,
in the greater darkness without
where all things are contained
and the clank and grind of universal gears
laboring toward a speck of dust
wherein god is hiding and watching,
the sharp metal echo of sorrowing,
the soft chord of euphoria,
of love and wildness,
how it is to be here in this shell
watching things die without pause
and quick as they have passed
others are sprung to replace them
in a ceaseless turning of fate
and blood and tissue and bone and marrow,
none certain but that which swallows all
impartial and spits it back anew
in various other forms,
the shape and the sound and the fluid,
the pneumatic speech of life and death
that comes like wind in lunar tow,
follow this wave until it has broken,
follow until there is no liquid
left in your great heart.

-S.C. Martinez