words

as if the night were composed of your thoughts
i stretch out into its vastness with a hunger
like saharan lions, gripping the throat of it
between my jaws to keep it from escaping into day.

teeming amid the clamor of so many endless others
i roar to elevate my presence,
to fix your fear to my sound and to give station
to the otherwise remote desert darkness.

i slide sinister through the tall grass
like famine stalking the weak,
i growl low and the earth shudders at my approach
and i am thus an apex predator of apex predators.

i drink from the river of your evening
where the world is replicated amid timid ripples
and the stars move like fireflies on the water
disturbed by the low winds of my breath on its body.

the tide struggles against all gravity
to be still of wave and of form entire,
to recant the very matter of its soul
yet there is only the desert surrounding this river
and so there are only we fools to drink of its mineral.

-S.C. Martinez