words

on the highway smell of rain on asphalt,
scent of the earth’s sweat against man’s doing,
taste of iron in the air.

call in to question the prior years to this,
the cigarettes and the rum and phantoms,
pills to keep the head straight
and night after night of insidious terror,
feeling of madness and egomania,
the blood contains within it tiny evil elementals
that creep through every vessel
to defeat our mild attempts at this,
as if some deeds by our ancestors were so terrible
that our lineage is forever cursed
to bear the burden of their punishment.

dirty hearts and finances,
dull columns rising forever from her fingers,
watching this all from afar
then drinking quietly in the dark,
in the car, the sting of future trauma
through a vibrating soul thread,
suicide and dollar signs,
cancer and debt, genius and slow remove.

a derelict of social behavior
and a recluse of normal human condition,
further into the night
through the bedroom door
the sound of her taste,
the shouting of these bored words
as the blue dawn washes,
a dark figure flanked by deep inebriation,
a habit familiar like an old flame
burning with or without tinder,
with or without a spark.

bright sounds spark frequencies,
back and forth dialect
i want more than anything to understand,
sleep at some point getting older,
sleep at some point sleep,
slow and unintelligent, confusing,
dreams of strange origin,
a feline presence watching me wander
the odd corridors of the id,
a fluid form moving through the night
untouched by pointless mutants
that need not exist.

here is the place where life is strange,
it hovers autonomous and pulsing
in the grayness of what lies between
the inner and the outer,
the sun sets and we stumble
into what quadrants of the world will have us,
we are men now
for we have murdered the child within.

-S.C. Martinez