words

i miss the concrete
as much as i thought it impossible,
i find myself vacant here
in all but wonder,
i encounter great savagery
and idiot tyrants
and this is what my world has become,
a circus of this, of these,
i dream of spiders and cruel women
and i awake to roaches and emptiness.

i sit in the sun to feel something,
to escape the closing in
of these eggshell walls
and old tenant smell,
of neighbor sounds
like muffled canine moans.

i long for dialogue,
much as i thought it impossible,
i long for discussion
and laughter, christ,
how i miss the laughter,
it is as if this corner of the world
turns only by hostility and madness
and would otherwise pull the earth
around its core,
they know nothing of violins,
they do not feel the wind,
there is only anger and mediocrity.

i yearn for misunderstood touch,
encounters on younger nights
as a young man struggled
to find some thread
with which to unravel
the finer patchwork of this,
wrestling enchanting women
older and younger
who spoke in parable and praise,
who spoke of remorse
and hammered out sadness
night after night in their own way
all the while preparing
for the world to end
on the edge of eyelash regret.

i feel a pulse once again
and though i sit quietly alone
watching the universe rip and tear
itself apart and reacclimate
i feel a sense of meaning
in these words as they remit
to my fingers a need to create
as violently as to destroy,
with grit teeth and bleeding eyes,
a Mozart impulse in inmate reason,
slashing and cutting letter for letter
from out the chrome heart of everything.

-S.C. Martinez