words

the words have gone on ahead
in to that blurring maelstrom
and what remains is insufficient
to consider oneself a master at anything;
there is only mediocrity
and it has become the form
to represent all forms,
a nerve-ending that writhes
in hydrogen winds
existing in a sort of non-strata
just beyond the edge of things,
just within a spider crack in greatness.

short breaths and bursts of light
and softly kindled fires
in either hemisphere of the brain,
something to take with you
on nights of octane spirit
wielding solitude while running on
in to the dark like a thing
lamenting its own form
and place in the universe.

recall hollow days filled with stanzas
beyond any reasonable defining,
where words came from somewhere
far below the skin and hidden
in some turning molten core
that seems to have burned through
and collapsed in on itself
like a dying star out there
in all that black matter.

days of beauty, nights of madness,
pages upon pages of distant requiem
written far before the passing of
its author, much advanced
upon the plain of genius
to come suddenly and ultimately
to a quiet terminus with which
no barter can be drawn,
it is the end of words
and so it is the end of things.

-S.C. Martinez