words

is she real, or have i made her
from the strange raw fabrics of my thoughts?
did i stitch her together
from different patterns that converge
into a great madness of heart?

she pulls the thread of my being
as if to unravel it
with obscene prejudice,
perhaps to recycle these frayed strings
in to some other thing altogether,
something less like myself,
something less aligned to the abstract,
corporeal, esteemed,
free in such ways as to advocate
a higher form from the lining of my soul,
a man less dark,
less shrouded in shadow,
less obscure with a realness of heart,
such strange entities existing somewhere,
existing in theory, in form.

her cigarettes lay like bullet casings
in the ashtray on the floor and she is a killer,
a formidable adversary
from concrete village
drinking the hours from green bottles,
married to the sound, the playlist,
caffeine and nicotine and dirty clothes,
vegas in her eyes, whispers of cash,
dollar bills and neon lights,
postcards and tourists, showgirls,
an american complexion of unyielding wildness,
modern unknown, red skin and bite marks,
claw tracings, eroticism in powder form
neatly packaged for my consumption.

where is the chord of this fury,
upon what instrument of the world
does it reverberate
and what hand plucks the string?
there lies in me a fixity for such luxury,
things that must be had,
the curves of her form,
the shade of her hair
and how it falls like midnight
upon the surface of timid waters,
some lake of inebriate recollect,
or perhaps conjured from no memory at all
but imagined wholly to fill in the bare spaces
where i have failed to properly risk;
her eyes are blood diamonds,
pearls in the sand
watching castles buried under tide.

i am slow death,
pouring smoke from my skull
like a volcanic tantrum of prehistory
with cancerous plans of self destruction,
born in an era where mediocrity is truth,
logic novelty and science myth,
the world slowly ceases to spin
from the weight of such revelations,
the friction in the air from so many passing words,
blood digital, brain binary,
flat fingertips and milky eyes
locked in caged sockets,
the sum of my worries,
each bottle a link in the chain
bonding blood to soul, the sundown of my evening,
the fading of my voice.

-S.C. Martinez

keep it in your head, these words:
angels also fuck.

did you think god had made them all at once?
that he, in his penthouse of clouds
calculated some arithmetic whereupon
the number of angels stood
on the far end of an equal sign?
that some variable perhaps existed
to fluctuate, to account for our mass of sin,
our ever increasing burden?
no, no;
angels also fuck.

or that instead, every so often,
he takes stock in his inventory
of heavenly derivatives
and scrawls figures upon a ledger,
pours plaster into an old and battered iron mold
to cook for–how long?–in the furnace
of his creationism? airbrushing pigment
and scraping away the residual flakes
of their holy conception?
no, no.
angels also fuck.

and yet they are not like us;
they do not do so for money, or drugs,
or to fill some void within
left by mothers and fathers who fled
to pursue some currency with which to plug
their own narrow gaps of being,
for how would such thoughts occur to them
without permanence among the filth of earth?
they do so for multiplicity, the hatchlings,
little souls with little wings
that are soft as they clouds they drag upon
with the same careless wonder
we too possessed as children,
stirring trails of vapor, small storms
that fall upon us without reason or rule.

and yet they are like us;
for they are not so pure,
and god not so wise and all seeing,
or perhaps he turns a blind eye
to their lust, their lurid indiscretions,
those moments of passion that erupt
from deep within their immaculate trappings,
to retire with great haste upon a hideaway island
high above the others,
where teeth are grit and eyes gasp open
and slap shut in the space of a breath,
where radiant skin does scratch
and, with the right pressure, break
and spill their gold blood upon the earth
in the form of sunsets,
and their wings may tear in the act
and shreds of soft cotton fall
as snow in bleakest winter.

they are overcome with love
and their hearts beat a common rhythm,
and should you,
at the dawn of your eternal sunrise,
find that heaven reeks of sweat and wet feathers,
remember, remember:
angels also fuck.

-S.C. Martinez

planes coerce the clouds glowing and fading
like fireflies the size of distant planets
and her shadow mimics everything
on the wall behind the bed
like a cauterized copy given to
by the blue diffused light of the television.

though your body is close you are elsewhere
as if your parts are halved by some thought
whose origins i can never be made known to
and what goes unsaid cascades about us
like a waterfall and it is thunderous this silence,
god the silence is a razor cutting through everything.

the lamplight here burns orange
and through the blinds of your window
it appears the world is afire
with similar moments as this
from flames that do not dance nor writhe
but simply burn and burn for ever.

in your bed i watch fanblades revolve
around a gilded heart like a machinated sun
reflecting the turning of my insides,
all gears and teeth and pivot and pattern,
the endless circle of things
and the early dark ensues
and evokes in me a strange poet of pale gloom
while beside me your hair is chaotic
and your skin is electric
and your sheets cover the floor
and your eyes suffocate me.

a long sheer of light spills through
from the balcony and it paints the walls
with nameless and thin shadows
like personified spiders conforming to our fears,
language replaced by our beating hearts and panting breath,
alive in here, safe from the world outside your room.

-S.C. Martinez

ashes in my drink
floating on the surface,
mildly disturbed by the tapping
of a restless extremity,
observing cold rain drops
streak across the windshield
like late sperm
racing over a spillway
toward some inevitable
disappointing conclusion,
sitting quietly in question
at 2am in the smoke filled cabin
of a dimly lit car,
running the battery down,
drinking the ashes down
with the deep red mood
while no one disturbs me,
not a living thing,
even when i wish it otherwise.

the rain falls harder
and the glass slowly drains,
cold winter hazard
cascading all around me
and nothing moves but precipitation
and the slow rolling of my thoughts,
not a question, no answer,
the dead reckoning of solace
and mild solitude
tearing at the fabric of patience
like a phantom of old dreams
from far gone memories,
the gelding that watched
from within the confines of a painting
this child sleep and wake trembling,
terrified of the world without
and then as now there were no others
though i terribly wished it otherwise.

something to balance
the real with the false,
the mind with the world,
the weird with the sane,
anything to quell the quiet frequency
at which the soul trembles.

-S.C. Martinez

i hear birds greet one another
in neighborhood rhetoric,
dogs loose from chains
bounding yard to yard
snapping at the heels of dawn,
the highway drone
of mechanized passage
like wind tunnels
from the deep corridors
of normal people sleep,
dreams of terminal reckoning
laid bare in this blue twilight
and upon my bed a slender feline
delicately navigates
the troubled shore of tangled sheets,
nimbly stepping over and around
water bottles both void
and in varying stages of completion,
open books and invisible markers
the gravestones of my abandoned dreams,
her whiskers stiff
and quietly brushing the air for disruption,
she stalks the windowsill
like a gargoyle keeping watch
over the world of men
in their strange early pursuits,
the birdcalls like primate dialogue
and she consumes it all softly
behind the screen
and underneath the blinds,
waiting for such a day
when all will pause and be open
to her small bodied advance.

-S.C. Martinez

on early spring nights,
a breeze from boxfans
and open windows,
spilling the ashtray and
knocking over glasses,
crushing water bottles
and i separate you
from your clothing
and we dance,
dancing behind a curtain
that keeps our light in,
enveloped in the warmth
of friction, the release
of kinetic energy stored up
over the winter,
sleeping with the balcony open
and waking in a warm summer,
tracing your curvature
and breathing in your faint aroma
and it is love that brings
this tinder to flame.

-S.C. Martinez

one discernible star
in this city, unremarkable,
tame as all others,
only one visible from this
sad collection of wasted souls,
this mess of tangled peoples.

one dimly lit star,
fading softly a million years on,
breathing deep the cosmic breath
of this ridiculous scheme,
the sound of tires burning
and the scent of sweat
and longing for acceptance,
the loud yelps like lesser beings
struggling to acclimate themselves
to a higher order,
one devoid of reason or conclusion,
a cyclic travesty of want,
of looking for.

perhaps this is an old soul
far beyond the need of company,
far beyond the longing,
adrift among an ocean of drunks
looking for some reason,
some cause to exist,
to ponder their cause
in the silken casing
of poet dreams,
scribbling lines
and breathing haggard breaths.

watch them now,
this conglomerate of terrible kids,
all so condemned to an aversion
of normalcy, of mediocrity,
walking the streets in drunken fatigues
because that is unique,
that gives you character.
tattoos and gauged ears,
watch the women go walking on the sidewalks
with their wild swagger
but when they turn,
through their eyes you can see
monstrous hearts aching in the heat
that radiates from so much contact,
they are dead long before
this transient vessel betrays them.

scratch out a living
beneath the endless scowl
of poverty,
here the gods go by
trailing their wares
in worn brown sacks,
bedecked with every manner
of heartache,
every broken promise,
shadowed by a caravan
of jars that clank and rattle
over the rocky gravel roads
as they pass, each jar
within them a madness
banging against the glass
like light weary moths,
a glowing ember
of erratic and harmful behavior.

watch them go,
the trail behind
like perforated lines
on the earth’s skin
and the turning commits them
to forever and cosmic eyes
bear witness to these migrant salesmen
and their dusty tired offerings,
each a replica of the one before
as if all were crafted
by a singular agent of piousness.

do not dig in their wake
for things left behind
for there are none,
do not embark
upon your own intrepid enterprise
for you are only mortal residue,
do not search for meaning
in this or any other thing
for there is none to be found.

-S.C. Martinez

wide eyed circumference,
a squeaking ceiling fan
and unused human parts,
the longing for touch,
taste, sound, lust,
for anything to feel human,
to feel like a man
prepared to break down mountains
with a shattering clenched fist,
a look of passion
or a word to halve helixes,
anything other than this
tired slow withdrawal from contact
like a spoonfed geriatric
dreaming of the olden days.

-S.C. Martinez

that night we scoured the earth
in search of a cure for our depravity
and we found the places where god had wept
and his tears were of bovine feculence,
delivered in plastic bags to our door,
we counseled one another
as to the nature of this expedition
and we consumed gram by gram
the nature of unfettered inner circus.

wandering the halls of that terrible place,
searching for wisdom for he had gone lost,
turning ill at a moments notice
and expunging the hateful poison
from out your stomach like exercising demons
in vomit wet with cocaine,
then onward, out into the night
that terrible courtyard of strange echos
perhaps lacking origin, others were there
and the air about our terrible company
became thick with smoke and madness,
we were all very deranged
and our eyes were like great black holes
that bore through bone and brain
into other dimensions like string theory,
drifters away from the norm
we congregated in the breeze and fell short
of any real knowledge gained,
only secrets of cosmic thought
usurped from careless meteoric vessels
cascading through the night.

space and time became a merged fluid conclave
and we walked through the beating heart
of american mediocrity,
rifling down fluorescent aisles
the clogged arteries of the beast,
in search of drink and answers
and we then retired back to the hollow
and drank and marveled at the insanity
of it all and when again we did find wisdom
he was much changed about the eyes and attitude,
altogether a different thing no longer wired
to the confines of ordinary suffering,
now an entity unto itself far beyond
the world we had envisioned
to find upon growing up, for he had traveled
those chemical highways and where they led
he had not reasoned upon, he had witnessed
the dark oracle of midnight
and he joined himself
to that remote blankness of soul.

-S.C. Martinez

my tongue burns acrid
from nicotine onslaught
and my chest heaves
and swells and retreats
and my lips burn
as the filter approaches zero,
well beyond midnight
i sit with no company
other than my own perilous
thoughts and ideations,
each moment another note
from this orchestra of soundless wonder.

i can feel the hour struggle
against the nature of its concept,
i roll reverse
through every mundane moment of the day
and nothing is gained again
and the curious madness
settles in, a violin heartbeat
stretching thin the hair strings
of symphonied posture,
upright nearly nude
the moonlight quakes
upon my skin
like a pale eyed assailant
with needle teeth
and murder in its heart.

i retreat further
and prescription friendship
is now so dear,
i watch the abstract debt
fall deeper
and the soul repossession
come nearer,
i listen quietly to the dark
and its memory of my beautiful counterpart,
the television departs
and the lights have gone out
and the ashtray goes to sleep
and i become the night.

-S.C. Martinez