words

she and i were born in limbo
within the wide walls of its stomach,
brought to stand before its wandering
and damned inhabitants,
to watch them writhe and burn and scream
endlessly, on and on endlessly,
their thin voices reaching up
and through the throat of the earth.

ours was a love that burned
with some strong chemical residue,
making everything sideways
and out of focus, slanting,
swaying in the early evening
then crashing come night,
our evils coming to the skin
and the room eating its own heart.

she and i spent summers driving the same streets
in the adult version of teenage boredom,
errands, work, work, work, work,
grown up bullshit that gets in the way
of drinking, and smoking,
of stealing the truth from the world
without suffering the consequences,
shit that makes you go insane
the more you get to do it.

ours was a love that burned
on universal law,
the dynamics of every thing
greater than ourselves,
trying desperately to find in a bottle
or a cigarette the knowledge we knew
to be out there, the answer to the madness
that would bring a breath, a beat,
that would make the world make sense again.

she and i belonged deep in the desert
but were stranded on the edge of the city,
forced to only dream of the sand,
the cracked earth, the erratic life,
the dry nights and awful days,
something to constantly remind us
that we are alive for the fear of falling
into an ordinary life.

ours was a love that burned
on rock and roll, on hip hop,
unencumbered by sobriety
so much to the point that it seemed
to only exist within the inebriation,
her touch some trembling thing
i had to trick and capture,
dousing the room in whiskey and water
just to attract her, just to hold her,
just to know her for another brief night,
intimately and ultimately,
laying there in the same dark
breathing in the same smoke,
delivered to this moment by the same choices
and the same crushing uncertainty
that chased us through our lives.

she and i were scholars of a poor sort,
forced to gather what notions we had
from small town democracy
and adapt them to a much greater world
and on any given evening
you could find us drunk on wine
and sorting through the world’s unsolvable problems,
believing then that we had solved them
but at different conclusions,
then debating like ancient orators
forever in to the early morning
before sleeping in separate rooms
and finding love in the afternoon.

ours was a love that burned
obscene and outright
like the lives of hardened people,
people who’ve been chiseled down
by the efforts of the earth
and find themselves cracked and thirsty,
angry at the poverty and the problems,
finding in the other some moment of agreement,
an acknowledgment that we are not the only ones,
that we for what we are are great champions,
colossi of every possible industry we encounter,
undone only by our own internal bedlams.

she and i shared a love i could write endlessly of,
more complicated than the world
and more intriguing than any other,
devoid of convention and bordering on abstract,
something that is difficult to understand
or appreciate until much later,
something before its time like a song
catching up to itself,  something influential
on everything that comes after.

ours was a loved that burned
fast and dangerous
and it is most notably in the crossing
of light and shadow that her beauty can be assessed
and in the corona of her eclipsing
i ignite with life at her brilliance,
mesmerized by her passage
as she puts holes in the sky with her chaos
and i will burn forever after
on the genius she left behind.

-S.C. Martinez