words

these terrible buildings
glow orange in the morning
and the world shudders
and stretches further from itself
in this vision as immigrants
go shuffling to the bus stop
and those who have settled in
stand on corners with their children
bleary eyed and restless
in sweat pants and cheap coats.

you can almost hear
the swelling heart of the city
beating, pulsing, hissing steam
and moaning poverty
over the sound of the streets,
the shouts and hollers
and mexican rhythm,
loud engines, rattling windows,
arguments and laughter,
sirens wail and children weep
and it is pulsing, this heart,
faster and faster
and threatening to burst
and you are nearly lost in it.

there is nothing normal about any of us
except that we are all strange
and thereby we are all together in this,
separate behind our thin walls
and shaded windows, alone together
in the wildness of this world
and all its strange street corners.

-S.C. Martinez