words

these terrible buildings
glow orange in the morning
and the world shudders
and stretches further from itself
in this vision as immigrants
go shuffling to the bus stop
and those who have settled in
stand on corners with their children
bleary eyed and restless
in sweat pants and cheap coats.

you can almost hear
the swelling heart of the city
beating, pulsing, hissing steam
and moaning poverty
over the sound of the streets,
the shouts and hollers
and mexican rhythm,
loud engines, rattling windows,
arguments and laughter,
sirens wail and children weep
and it is pulsing, this heart,
faster and faster
and threatening to burst
and you are nearly lost in it.

there is nothing normal about any of us
except that we are all strange
and thereby we are all together in this,
separate behind our thin walls
and shaded windows, alone together
in the wildness of this world
and all its strange street corners.

-S.C. Martinez

this is far too complicated,
there are too many holes in the world
through which to fall
and not by any means,
a reasonable number of exits
yet so few ways out of the tunnels
we daily dig, deeper and deeper
the axiom of loneliness
closer to the core,
expel this theory,
find some approach to quiet
these terrible inner world demons
that spit and grin and chew
the tangled cords at the base
of my neck, burrowing through
the cerebellar center of my being.

do not wake them, christ
if it can be helped,
do not disturb their fiery lope
behind my eyes, pulling wires
to focus here then there,
a complicated series of pulleys
and levers to control the arms
and legs and head,
an old projector spraying
technicolor, faded moving pictures
of sordid fears and paranoid wonder,
a phantasmagoria of fever worlds
where all that I know to be terrible
is real, and all that I know to be real
is terrible.

-S.C. Martinez

men with purpose,
those germane to the universe,
those who shed inadequacy
like a summer coat,
they are not me.

men who felt the thrill
in the marrow of their bones
and composed whatever
may have bled from their ego
into a symphony of meaning,
i do not know them.

those who walked the earth
like giants lacking fear,
living and dying
in the space between the two,
scrawling their names
into the blood of everything
and drawing from nothing
their will to go on,
these men are strangers
to my timid enterprise
and they make my heart feel weak
in shameless comparison.

-S.C. Martinez

we are all kings, liars and hypocrites,
criers of mediocrity and unimportant things,
we carry the banner of 24 hour nonsense
and never-ending bullshit.

we are all the very same,
what one lacks is made up for in another
and back and forth, so on and so on,
there is no difference from one to the next.

we are all so boring,
the same things said over and over again,
the same words passing through the same lips
like very comical prophets of repetition.

we are all kings, liars and hypocrites,
idiots, maniacs, devils and derelicts,
we are all the same and we are all so boring
but i’m the only one who knows it.

-S.C. Martinez

your chrome skin dictates
a more delicate touch,
something only native elements possess,
wind and fire and water,
the breath of the evening,
the tips of my fingers
interrupting the moonlight shore
of your flesh.

your hips are something else altogether
that i cannot coherently discuss,
it becomes a mess of words and sounds
and half-wit moans
for your movements are surreptitious,
sudden and mollifying,
able to quiet my mouth
and cause my heart to hesitate.

your shoulders weave a silken trace
as they slide up and down,
your spine is a ladder i wish to climb,
the curve of your back
a romance i must succumb to,
the back of your thighs
a calm moment, a saturday morning.

your form is halved in perfect symmetry
and i am but a peasant in this regard,
watching and waiting and knowing,
knowing that you are not
a thing i am meant to know,
just an image or idea that exists
to keep me on the edge of an unfinished madness.

-S.C. Martinez

i am not shel silverstein,
i’m just some asshole with a pen.

i drink and i judge,
those are my two things;
drinking, and judging.

the order is not entirely necessary
but the former typically precludes the latter.

i stand just slightly outside of everything
and attempt to capture the whirring maelstrom
of color and sound, but it moves too fast
for just some asshole with a pen to keep up.

i am the vanguard satellite
keeping watch over cosmic trash.

i was born of liquid and fire
and i will perish in a cloud of smoke,
there then not, simple, succinct, gone.

-S.C. Martinez

it moves along like a highway
cut through this american heart
over miles of native blood and ignorance
to a beating mecca, a conglomerate
of coca-cola signs and mcdonald’s arches,
idiot monsters in orbit
with fat eyes and wet lips
ejaculating in a mass frenzy
before miles of television sets
all filled with kfc commercials,
double down, mutherfuckers.

lube in the air you breathe
and waste in your veins,
we must siphon gasoline
and manufacture poverty
to keep this circus in motion,
to keep you in the factory mentality
like junkies in need of tight regulation.

burn your dead and move on,
don’t waste time on dreams,
work, work, work and eat
and purchase and excrete and repeat,
keep your fucking head down
and marry for convenience or necessity,
push out as many useless kids as you can
then sit back and watch them spin
like tiny nightmares,
fight the urge to eat razor blades
and poison your family,
stay well hid in the open
and wear nothing under your clothes,
push them together and pray someone notices.

-S.C. Martinez

i explode like phenomena,
i am ignition and thereafter fire,
i am a madhouse on your street
where criminals and creeps reside.

your eyes still possess a tranquil necessity
and i am here burning, burning,
weaving flame and sound together
in some abstract delirium
waiting for the day to pass.

i am surrounded by the errors of my ethos,
i break apart thought
and piece meaning from nothing,
i attempt to write words in the sky
to captivate and capture,
but i succeed only in mixing clouds
into miles of muck and meaningless cotton.

i expire like an old poem
waiting for some more powerful series of words
to come along and make greater sense,
i dream in devil red the parameters of my heart
and i wake screaming and howling
the waste and weird,
chasing some illusory matter
and putting chimeras to bed.

we tear through the night now,
cutting highway and moonlight
through and through,
burning like a cigarette
a black hole through the center of everything,
taking the night with us
and our high speed regret,
trailing fire on the road
and smoke in their eyes.

-S.C. Martinez

everything was so loud and so dark,
so fast and angry, upsetting
down to the material of things,
a constant stutter and yammer,
back and forth, this and this,
me and you, darkness and smoke
and madness.

never ending this struggle,
it became then an exercise
in the pitfalls of morality,
the fucking brown spots on the soul
like so many cigarette burns
on the carpet, the mattress,
karma, enlightenment,
the very existential bullshit.

like a behavior experiment
in the worst of things,
clawing out day after day
the pitiful sorrow of our hearts
like something atomic and playful,
some marrow to which ordinary people
are without and do not understand.

we spoke in transparencies
and howled lament in to the nights,
the very nature of our hell
was something beyond our mortality,
something that could not be reasoned with,
could not be bargained with,
was simply a god to observe
in the making of our hostile lives.

this place was so strange
and so wonderful, so austere
and so awful all within a breath
it was almost too much to endure
and even now to speak of it is terrifying,
but there was something in the depths of it
that brought about these words
and so from that, then,
there is this, there is this.

-S.C. Martinez

repetition, repetition,
repetition, repetition,
faucet drip insomnia,
electric hum
and the blue arc of death,
poor choices and slow egress,
emergence from this dark corner,
hunger and delirium,
headaches, pornography,
hubris and defecation.

bones popping and skin scratching,
yellow pills of comfort,
of denial and acceptance,
dark hour destitution,
bare walls and empty pockets,
echoes of poverty,
insect armies setting up bases
in the corners of my room,
crawling across my skin at night
and retreating as i rise.

the sun comes and goes
in negative order
and this circadian rhythm is weak
and unstable like atom bomb nuclei
ready to break apart the whole world
in a quiet evening of sadness,
watching the minutes grow tired
and move on, watching the morning
of my night come to pass
in a kind of idiot repetition
where i am a cycle without pause,
repetition, repetition,
repetition, repetition.

-S.C. Martinez