words

keep it in your head, these words:
angels also fuck.

did you think god had made them all at once?
that he, in his penthouse of clouds
calculated some arithmetic whereupon
the number of angels stood
on the far end of an equal sign?
that some variable perhaps existed
to fluctuate, to account for our mass of sin,
our ever increasing burden?
no, no;
angels also fuck.

or that instead, every so often,
he takes stock in his inventory
of heavenly derivatives
and scrawls figures upon a ledger,
pours plaster into an old and battered iron mold
to cook for–how long?–in the furnace
of his creationism? airbrushing pigment
and scraping away the residual flakes
of their holy conception?
no, no.
angels also fuck.

and yet they are not like us;
they do not do so for money, or drugs,
or to fill some void within
left by mothers and fathers who fled
to pursue some currency with which to plug
their own narrow gaps of being,
for how would such thoughts occur to them
without permanence among the filth of earth?
they do so for multiplicity, the hatchlings,
little souls with little wings
that are soft as they clouds they drag upon
with the same careless wonder
we too possessed as children,
stirring trails of vapor, small storms
that fall upon us without reason or rule.

and yet they are like us;
for they are not so pure,
and god not so wise and all seeing,
or perhaps he turns a blind eye
to their lust, their lurid indiscretions,
those moments of passion that erupt
from deep within their immaculate trappings,
to retire with great haste upon a hideaway island
high above the others,
where teeth are grit and eyes gasp open
and slap shut in the space of a breath,
where radiant skin does scratch
and, with the right pressure, break
and spill their gold blood upon the earth
in the form of sunsets,
and their wings may tear in the act
and shreds of soft cotton fall
as snow in bleakest winter.

they are overcome with love
and their hearts beat a common rhythm,
and should you,
at the dawn of your eternal sunrise,
find that heaven reeks of sweat and wet feathers,
remember, remember:
angels also fuck.

-S.C. Martinez