words

would it be more reasonable
to remove an ear,
to dress in yellow,
to chase my thoughts
round and round
like a burning wheel,
to sift through the penstrokes
of my indelible ministry,
the hypergraphia in my nerves,
wormholes in my limbic system.

are you there,
manifesting nights from your eyes
and drinking daylight from a jar,
can you hear my footsteps
hollow and deep in the terminals
of your narrow memory?

bring the summer with you,
glorious phenomenon,
disrupt this awful chill
and the black thoughts it conjures,
speak to me in vibrations,
rolling waves of your vocal touch
in alien frequency,
spill the ink of your words
upon everything i see
then drift, drift, drift casually
like a ghost lamenting the form
it has assumed.

i found something cosmic
between the lines on a sheet of paper
and i pulled its lettered limbs apart
with the end of my pen
and smeared it into spirals,
stray thoughts and odd drawings,
i murdered the thing
and it then became quite beautiful
and pleasant to observe.

-S.C. Martinez