words

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

as if the night were composed of your thoughts
i stretch out into its vastness with a hunger
like saharan lions, gripping the throat of it
between my jaws to keep it from escaping into day.

teeming amid the clamor of so many endless others
i roar to elevate my presence,
to fix your fear to my sound and to give station
to the otherwise remote desert darkness.

i slide sinister through the tall grass
like famine stalking the weak,
i growl low and the earth shudders at my approach
and i am thus an apex predator of apex predators.

i drink from the river of your evening
where the world is replicated amid timid ripples
and the stars move like fireflies on the water
disturbed by the low winds of my breath on its body.

the tide struggles against all gravity
to be still of wave and of form entire,
to recant the very matter of its soul
yet there is only the desert surrounding this river
and so there are only we fools to drink of its mineral.

-S.C. Martinez

i accept what i wish to accept
and condemn that which i do not;
your presence in this world
is circumspect and based solely
on my allowing it to exist,
otherwise you are merely a rumor,
someone’s memory of someone
who does not fit
into my historical judgment of things.

everything is at my discretion,
the earth turns because i allow it,
the sun aches from far beyond
only in my head and in my heart
and thereby in yours,
and thereby in yours.

all things serve at my behest
and in this reckoning
it is awful to find that i am wrong
and quite suddenly and terribly
powerless, unable to command
any thing at all no matter the force
that i exert, no matter the power
that i relinquish.

i stand with sour thoughts
kicking at the dirt,
fishing in my pockets
for some thing to control
and finding none i am condemned
like the things i do not allow
and now my presence is circumspect
and based solely
on my allowing it to exist
and i weigh the benefits
and handicaps of that truth
and find that even in this
i am but a mere observer
of some greater analysis.

-S.C. Martinez