words

don’t let god crush you in his hand,
his is a hard world to endure
and he a hard spirit to appease
that does not accept sacrifice,
this place is purgatory
with pine trees that skirt the heavens
and brush the clouds,
the gray sky a manifest of your heart
as it waits here,
as it slowly inherits
the qualities of stone.

god is watching and measuring your guilt
and shame on some barbaric scale,
he said the weird die young,
the weird must perish first
and so the days here are spent
slowly counting down
to the hour when he will exact
that which is due him.

your souls are twisted and gnarled
like knots in a tree,
the collective of the womb oak
and this familial clan
must hammer out an existence
while bearing some metaphysical debt
that may or may not be paid.

this place is savage,
caught between paradise and hell,
with dogs that watch the roads
with envy in their blood,
fires that burn simply to burn,
flames that put back the night
and sparks that move on with the wind
to secure the onset of morning
and as i follow
i see god has opened up the floor of heaven
and let his light fall upon you briefly,
a transient warmth that he must surrender
only for a moment
so that your hearts do not go soft.

-S.C. Martinez

I AM THE SUN
i shout each day
at the zenith of my crossing.

i follow a rhythm
inherent to existence itself
and no formulas nor suppositions
can unravel its reasoning.

the harmonic waves of the universe
are echoed in solar tsunamics
and as i burn i burn through and through,
an orange heart too heavy for this,
a stellar organ in agony
over eons of light and gravity.

-S.C. Martinez

it’s a special kind of drunk
when a reunion takes place,
something words fail to properly express
but alcohol deciphers perfectly,
some odd re-arrangement of matter
in to a more understandable manner.

it’s an even greater parable
when the reunion takes place
between a drunk and a drink,
something words fail to properly address
but the id deciphers perfectly
in to a more reasonable manifest.

echoes strangle the night
and there is something strong
hiding in the thick ropes of it
as we engage in spark and fire
and smoke and burn like ancients
concerned only with the present.

there is something inherently powerful
in the strength of this history,
fact inseparable from memory
and this encyclopedia of strung on moments
is perfectly administered
over the course of these years, this life.

-S.C. Martinez

cartoons and strangeness fill the hours,
vodka and orange juice, work and money,
sleep and wild dreams, smoke and apathy,
chasing the delirium like a feral dog
with nothing better to do.

i’ll carry these memories in a flask
to tilt back when the loneliness arrives,
the burn in my throat a throwback
to a more delicate time in this history,
quiet evenings and nights like velvet.

i catch flashes of mercury in the air
and i slide quietly through the days
like a good man bent on self destruction,
littering the world as i go about
with empty bottles and empty promises.

-S.C. Martinez

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

so troubled she dreams in nightmares,
of blood red blackness and pistols,
cowboy hats and dirty hearts
and yet awake she is some gentle creature
who bears witness, who drinks of the sun
and likes pretty things.

it is as the night draws closer
that these two begin to mix and change
until only one remains
and in the crossing she drinks moonlight
and lives in a thick aura, a haze
and is wild, erotic, visceral and alive,
loving, dangerous to no end,
this pinup princess, this musical thing.

she whispers evil words and bites her lip,
her eyes ignite in an aurora
and she is at peace now in this twilight,
in this moment a DMT machine,
hair pulled taut, corset strings hang loose
and we moved the earth, we made it spin
and we chose the axial tilt
to which its turnings are slave to.

she is drawn in by the blackhole
churning at the center of my heart
taking time and space and thought
to the depths of its own swirling turmoil,
a casualty to the nature
of my conflict driven necessity,
survival by novae and emptiness.

panic in the lamplight, fluttering,
a madness mimicked in shadow
as we scratched the surface of existence,
digging through volumes of words
like historians laboring over some rapture,
we were too cool for this world
and so we ventured out to find others,
skating around moons and through galactic rings,
stars marking the progression of our greatness
by leaving bright explosions in our aftermath.

-S.C. Martinez

she has burned with a fire
drunk on gasoline,
thick and dark and angry,
she has a strange lucidity
that lingers long after
her presence has gone,
something with powder
and grime, a slick residue
with a troubled aftermath.

she has chewed up the night
and spit it back out
just to keep the sun away,
she has painted on walls
the wild murals of her dreams
and they were intoxicating
and it was devastating,
to see the beautiful mind
of a strange young girl
so completely and honestly defined.

she has lied more than she has not,
she is covered in art and bad thoughts
like a comic book villainess
terrorizing my brief little time with her,
she has cheated, she has stolen,
she has fucked and maimed and murdered,
she burns down every street she passes
with smoke coming from her lips
and fire between her hips.

she has names for all her demons,
she dresses them like whores
and sends them out in to the night,
she has felt it all,
the sky and the dirt,
she has put her hand in and through
the vein of the universe
and by its coursing she has seen
things we are not meant to see
and she has brought back
some of it with her.

she has left men stranded
on roads, in rooms, in a flash
of shock and shame,
she burns like a bonfire
drunk on wood and winter,
she has crawled home
and she has made home come to her,
she has recalibrated the alignment
of the stars and planets
and all things that please her,
she will never die
but she will vanish in a puff of smoke
and drift off with the wind.

-S.C. Martinez

what is there to write, really,
what should i say;
how about,
“world getting weirder,
angrier, louder, every,
single,
day.”
would that be good?

so, again, what is there to write,
what could i possibly come up with
that would in any way
float across their attention spans,
get them to stop googling
and facebooking and twittererering,
gizmodoing, myspacing,
an epilepsy of slashes and dotcoms,
advertisements jammed in to corners
that leap out at you terrifically,
terrifyingly, a pornography of economics.

what can i contribute to this?

why can’t i just sort of,
blend in with that world
and disappear rapidly
behind the invisible wall
of outside, with mailboxes,
fences, newspapers,
sidewalks, benches,
lawnjockeys and animals and insects,
things other than moving windows
and faceless tragedy, formless predators,
hatchetmen that chase you through CAT5 cables,
knowing every place you’ve ever been to,
instantly, just by wanting to know,
your life trapped in packets and streams,
traffic and protocols.

a bit future emerging
from the central nervousness
of this network, you fight day and night
the transmission control
and the data thugs, information heists,
less terminal agents of attack
but ones you will war with forever after,
war with a napalm heart
or get lost in the current.

there will be new horrors,
in some form, that will slowly bury you
and you will never see the sun,
kept inside your little room
trapped behind your door,
pounding out attack sequences
on the keyboard with your thoughts,
you will surrender to a low hum
in the informational scheme of things,
the universe that we create now
will take you back in to its bosom then.

-S.C. Martinez

i must implant this thought
in a seed, a bud,
within the blooming heart
of an orchid
whose petals open wide
to let in the sun.

i must encapsulate this moment
within the soluble walls
of a pill, broken apart
in to milligrams
and put away in a bottle
with other similar moments
to be unhoused
at some more pressing time.

i must till the soil surrounding this idea,
drop it in a tiny earthen hole
and enclose it with dirt
to come back months later
to great rising stalks of genius
which i must then hack down
and gather and consume.

i must wrap this sensation in a cocoon
to keep the instar safely hid,
waiting for eclosion,
waiting to pump fluid in to its wings
before escaping quietly
on the edge of a breeze,
sailing about the night
like some lunar native
on its way to some greater cause.

-S.C. Martinez

i drew an ak-47 in the dirt
and called it love,
i circled it with a heart
and made annotations
in the margins of the grass
to extrapolate through the act
some more complete idea of this,
of you, and you, and you.

i am drunk before the sun has set
and i watch the road
for the headlights and dust
of your approach
and seeing nothing i turn inward
this external need for a connection,
this shorting of asynchronous circuits.

i watch the evening bleed out
through blood red curtains
and i drink more and feel less,
swirling about in my own memories
i am thus a man of fire and alcohol,
burning every way as i write
the same words over and over again
because i think the same thoughts
over and over again,
the same forward progression
of you, and you, and you.

my tongue laminates
the dull shade of my teeth
as i glean grains of wisdom
from the daily labor of your memory,
your fingers moving rapidly
through dollars and wine bottles,
i echo your economics of alcoholism
and amoral self-indulgence,
praying the night hides my sins,
this impressionist of bad habits.

-S.C. Martinez