words

fluorescent light from my younger days,
a child of strange merging, wandering
through the house looking for things unknown;
such light now, so many years on,
spoils the utter darkness of her apartment
though it scarcely finds us in the bedroom
and it is just enough to know we exist.

she lies naked on her stomach
and her pale breasts touch the edge of the bed
in perfect symmetry and geometric proof,
the light forms her body discreetly
and i run my fingers over her skin,
across her shoulders, down her spine, her thighs;
the boxfan on the floor, propped against the wall,
pulsates rhythmically like a distant song
and her dark hair is quietly disturbed
by its rippling waves and her eyes are wild
and serve as nurseries to stars in combusting births
and the color is difficult to pin down
and it may be that i love them and her
in equal jurisdiction marked out
within the strange spiral galaxies of my heart.

a glass of merlot cradled in her delicate hands
like an offering of arterial blood dark and foreboding,
the stuff of hearts that cascades down her lovely throat
and i am unworthy of her touch, her kiss, her gaze,
but she is kind, she is soft, lovely as those lands
of the earth as yet unfound and so unfaded,
a lunar eclipse that cannot be felt by hand,
cannot be heard, measured, can only be compared
against that which bears no common description,
the places kept hidden by the id, something greater
than words from the greatest of poets
in their greatest of hours.

she is sweet like spring evenings,
sunset of flame and enigmatic pondering,
inspiring pursuit from the lonesome argonauts
lost in the remote stations of my wayward spirit,
she is ice in my wine that clatters against the glass
as i walk back and forth her empty home
while she is away, ruminating over her and her mind
and she is wonderful and i lose this contest
of sculpting her beauty in paper and ink,
yet still i will carve her name in to a thousand nights
to catch and keep her affection.

-S.C. Martinez