words

the eyes of god are upon you
and you can do nothing
but drive faster, harder
into the heart of it
like some mythical beast
who is only conquered
by blood, bone and gasoline.

the world flattens out
and the road straightens
for miles of empty space
and at night the snow
erupts like phosphor
in the bleary gaze of headlights,
an endless plain beyond
of a wet and glaring white
and dead winter grass.

you have no home, wanderer,
drifter from couch to borrowed bed,
carrying your belongings
in a plastic grocery sack,
a pint of fire in your pocket,
hands grip the steering wheel
and the world at your whim.

———————————-

i smash a roach
beneath the bottom
of my whiskey glass
and i watch quietly,
detached, calculative
his final moments expire
in a thin silent twitch
through the smokey brown murk.

i smash the night
beneath the heroin weight
of stone tired eyes,
sucking the dark
from each moment
until a barter can be met
and sleep can be had.

i disturb the agreement
at this quiet locus,
brewing lightning and gridlock
in the clogged receptors
of some tangled neurology,
twisting, shaking,
falling and drowning
in the mystery beneath
like a case of bad brains.

———————————-

i make helter in the country
and bring skelter to the city
and at night i can feel my heart
beat hard against my chest
and i can hear it like a war drum
hollow in my ears.

the days are good
but the nights are better,
filled with a violent or criminal
juxtaposition with philosophy
and necessity, the weird
with the ordinary,
some viral benediction.

i awake to the staggering certainty
that this is who i am,
this and no other man
was i meant to be nor could i be
no matter what lies
the devil may tell.

———————————-

a cold halo circles the night
and the city lights in the distance
lay like fallen stars
perched on the horizon
and this mortal clay is warm
by the friction of love and war.

girls made of liquor
walk around in high heels
daring the world to crumble,
the soft nothing of their eyes
threatening everything
and the cold air crushes your bones
while the girls go moving on.

the trees stand by
like watchers over the road,
gnarled fingers reaching out
and here death is a sound,
death is a whisper
you understand only too late.

the universe exists
so that i may exist within it,
in ego, glowing this amniotic cosm
and i know now i must pay back
every ounce of this anima debt,
sin by sin, person by person
before the world will turn
a full revolution and i with it.

-S.C. Martinez

i go to the diner
because i enjoy listening
to the hardened women speak.
they rattle off complaints
like bullets with no regard
for who is near.
long hours, low pay, shitty men,
whores for coworkers
and assholes for customers.
if you sit at the counter
you will be hit with expletives;
it is a social contract.
money, lovers, dirty dishes
and wet, gnarled hands.
their teeth are lost
in the slow cycle of decay.
they smell of addiction
and sour childhoods, bad memories
of daddy and every man
that has come after
and they take out this aggression
on hash browns, sausage patties
and egg shells.
the names of children tattooed
on their wrists and necks.
stretch marks and mean faces.
the endless hiss of oil
and the rising of steam
accompany the clang and clatter
of various instruments,
the scraping of utensilary madness.
arguments are had, alliances forged
and broken in the span of cigarette breaks.
they count down the hours
with a harsh fatigue,
add up the dollars
and perform simple arithmetic
to determine the level
of that day’s misery.
hair pulled and pinned,
lightly dusted with grease.
skin taut and wrinkled nerves
and their eyes hold fire.
ain nobody got no hours,
pull two bacon, a weird language
in the back and forth economics
of breakfast with strangers.
they scratch their arms with long nails
and make crude references.
i suck down my food and exit.
the world is not so bad.

-S.C. Martinez

i let a fire burn
just to watch tendrils rise,
the gray reach like arms
up and out to some ultimate terminus.

i let a fire burn
just to feel the heat again,
the writhing warmth
that moves up the spine slowly.

i let a fire burn
because i need it to,
to satisfy this elemental dependence
like a bent slave must.

-S.C. Martinez

the click clack of her heels echoes sharply
in the narrow avenues of my brain,
the boulevards wherein she was mine
and i was able to know her.

the click clack of her heels comes back at me
through stone resonance
howling off the architecture of everything.

there is rhythm here, if it can be found,
there is rhythm here to manifest sound
in the form of jazz halls and blues joints,
the steady spilling of harmony out in to the night.

it is this way each time she leaves,
each time she goes it is this way,
her flowered gait leaves gardens behind
and i become a shadowed visitor
entangled in the ivy walls of her aftermath.

for a moment more it is as this,
a sprawling chaos rendered from hours of waiting,
hours of pretending,
watching satellites break from orbit
and fall back in with the others
as i stand waiting by the wayside
for a moment with this singularity.

-S.C. Martinez

how hot is your little sun,
how bright can it get?

when they follow my eyes
i look upon myself as a king,
a great warrior of hearts
and when they turn away
i see only shame and mutant fatigue,
a false prophet, a coward.

i sit in a tiny room
claustrophobic against my possessions
and i think only of their eyes,
their wandering sensibility,
their pictureframe arrhythmia
and i do this because i must.

i fashion a sun dial
from liquor bottles
and count down the evening
where it is acceptable
to drink like an old poet
of failed philosophy
and terrifying, changing industry.

drones forever separate
this moment from the next
and by god i will burn in hell
for every minute after
if that is what it takes
to gather some substance from this,
this beleaguered method
of change through persistence.

-S.C. Martinez

no witness to mark one moment from the next,
none to quiver and shout as things begin to emerge
out of nothing; stars, quarks, tiny strings,
brushstrokes from an almighty artisan.
gas and dust spiral and merge and war and result
in bold rocks in the heavens, those we can see,
those we can only feel in our bones,
the mystery of it, the universal uncertainty
of other world icons floating out there
beyond our knowing, anchoring our hearts to this one.

-S.C. Martinez

shiver in the morning
and burn in the evening,
autumnal love affairs
rush the blood
on cold nights and all in vain,
for what, some synaptic light show
wherein all thoughts are visible.

walk the careful lawns,
manicured like french tips
and there are street lamps ablaze
in the weird sidewalked town
that is this,
a cluster of fear,
afraid of the dark
and the gunshots
and the answers
to more unanswerable questions.

young girls flutter and fawn,
destroy the world
with their delicate way
and leave older, broken boys
standing with hands in pockets
or gripping steering wheels,
drifting in and out
town after town,
city by city,
we the keepers of their despair
so that they may be extraordinary.

health fails, dreams die,
things change and people move on,
girls become women
and strangle this understanding,
revert you back to an idiot child
with no sense or memory,
a vessel aimless and dumb
and to this i say fuck their despair,
i give it back
to each and every slowly
over the course of many years,
ignoring, pretending,
choosing to remove myself
from their tapestry of conquests.

-S.C. Martinez

nothing can touch me here,
i lick vodka from a wet glass
and burn medicine that toils
in my throat, in my lungs,
in my blood and in my head.

her hollow bones sing
a birdsong far off and light,
a dream, a lie, a distraction
against the slow comedown
from this very brief apex.

i want to be rid of this lesson,
i want to be quit of this place
and go back to the evening rise up,
the momentum that crests and breaks
at the changing of the guard,
the brief turnover wherein god
in his holy fatigue closes a tired eye
and is blind to the comradery that exists
with the demons i work so diligently
to bury in the day, in the light.

come at me with your reasons,
your criminal obsession
and watch this fire wither and wane,
tremble and choke and pulse
the slow antibeat of death,
watch this lesson be rid of you,
watch this place turn liquid
and unpleasant to be in,
watch me quietly exit
back in to a dream you dreamt long ago.

-S.C. Martinez

headlights swing past like meteors
and we are coming out with the night,
a steady stream from cars and porches,
swinging in on dark ropes,
thieves, idiots, artists and stranglers
alike all in the reckoning of midnight.

pretty girls slide past dangerously
leaving behind perfume clouds
and the light impression of their movement,
their eyes close and they move to the sound
and they smile and shout and dance, dance
while the world spins and things turn.

strange people on strange crooked streets,
traffic lights on wires swinging in the breeze
and everything is calm and quiet,
somehow muted in the dense volume of now,
in the low hum of these weird machines.

-S.C. Martinez

there is a gentle satisfaction
in never hearing a song completed.

to linger in the slow echo
of its ever changing body
rolling onward through the years.

the same parts played again
and again, evolution in sound
and again, a drifting of words
melancholy and aimless.

it moves like water, like light,
in constant transfer with itself,
notes in tandem spill through
the cracks in the house
and lend themselves to the world without,
never completing, ending abruptly.

-S.C. Martinez