words

drunk on wine in the afternoon,
it is sunday and the sun has been to church
and elected to take the rest of the day off
and so this date belongs to the clouds,
all gray and ridden with promise,
the wind picks up here and there
and re-arranges the early leaves in this autumn,
the cancer leaves that fell first, the drunks,
the drug addicts, the idiots and fools
whose fire climaxed too soon and now
they are doomed to crumble and blow away.

dogs howl war songs, battle cries
at the lawnmowers and the walkers,
at anything and anyone who dares advance
uninvited upon their carefully crafted homes,
their graveyards of buried bones.

drunk on wine in the afternoon
and i can hear a change in pitch,
i can sense things shifting
like the innards of an old clock
and though i am ignorant of what this means
i am obligated to follow,
what else is there to do on a sunday
but chase the rhythm of the universe
to wherever it ultimately settles.

i crisscross city and state like a bounty hunter
in search of some metaphysical capture,
some essence to keep back the roaches
and the businessmen, the lurid women
with casually indifferent hearts,
the waywards of my arrested development.

drunk on wine in the afternoon
i stand up to greet the evening
as it approaches slow and altered,
drunk on the wine of its own afternoon
we engage in a brief reminiscence
before each departing in the direction
of our respective ephemeral engagements.

-S.C. Martinez