words

the world is broken and bleeding
and from a crack in the ground they come,
an army of little red men
wearing little black suits
with little red ties,
smoking and laughing, shaking hands,
they scale the shear wall of my back
with fish hooks and ephemeral ropes of hair,
their cloven hooves leave little burning tracks
on either side of my spine,
those little bastards are mean
and grinning loudly like serial rapists.
they reach my shoulders and here
they all clamor around the rim of my ear
and whisper all at once suggestions, loops,
obsessions, a maelstrom of tiny outland voices
and it works, a suggestion, a loop,
an obsession takes hold and they climb in
through a hole in my head and make camp
and the smoke can be seen rising and rising
as it pours from out my skull.

they chew the fat,
they have a drink,
they settle in and dream little dreams,
my head itches and i shake it
and they shout in protest,
a foreign tongue, dirty looks.

they come for the cards,
they march on and my brain stinks
with steam and bad thoughts
and i start to forget things
and remember days that don’t belong to me.

every footfall comes with an explosion of nerves,
a branching network,
a brownout, the lights dim one by one by one
and then they stop, they come for the cards
so tables are set,
wages are waged,
cigars and bourbon,
poker chips and soul bits for currency
and they play for days,
never pausing, never ceasing,
drinking and shouting and seething,
mexican sweat, blackjack and seven card stud,
a cloud of weird weird thoughts
hangs over everything and my mind chokes,
convulses, and spits
and they are ejected, sent flying
in to the world outside my head again,
they hit the ground and crawl back in
to that other place from which they came,
coughing and cursing
and waving little red fists in the air,
those little red bastards,
they will be back again at another time
and we’ll do it all over again.

-S.C. Martinez