words

i look for her around every corner
but every face is different,
every fire is but smoke and embers
and they say leave it, leave it
yet every dream is of this,
every night the tedium is racing
and tiring, you and them
with their spidered interactions,
tight veins and dirty skin,
thin suitors with black eyes
crushing the light.

this mess of mine is trouble,
i cannot gauge sleep
and i split the hours
with sharp awareness,
always looking around every corner
for any sign of her intrusion,
her madness and those indigents
she brings with her,
looking over my shoulder at every sound
and fighting shadows in the dark,
warring with spiders every morning.

my lungs are hot with words
but every chance is lost,
every fire is but spark and angst
and they say leave it, leave it
yet every moment is this,
every day the wearing down
until my back is bent and my heart is quiet,
silence and still fingers
and then the dreams of you and them
with their spidered interactions,
gnarled arms and wasted lives,
men of saturday nights
dousing the flames
and crushing the light.

-S.C. Martinez

she moves through the night
like a serpent slender and rapid,
wild and writhing,
she is so thin you can feel her nerves
through her shirt.

she smells of ransom and she moves constantly,
her spine dances up and down her back like a river
and she does not want that feeling to stop,
keep moving, keep dancing,
she snaps her jaws at the onset of morning.

her blood contains within it
the secret carried swiftly in the current,
raw and clear, overtaking every cell
and making it slave to this protocol,
burning down pain and replacing it
with wonder, a prism of possibility
and warmth like god.

she clutches her skirt through bony fingers
and is dancing, dancing the hours down
to where this moment is a memory
and must be sought after and trapped
and bottled and preserved
by whatever means necessary,
by fire or murder or treason,
anything to get this feeling
back in her soul
and if you broke open her bones
you would find poison in the marrow,
singing to you like sirens with morphine breath
waiting for the dance to begin
and if you let them
they would take you and you would never return.

she is danger in purest form,
she plows on through the darkness
and takes you with her and you feel fear
as she breaks law and covenant
dragging behind her karma and regret,
she makes the heart go criminal
and as she vanishes so too does the night
and you are grateful to be free
of this unreasonable and unreckonable creature.

-S.C. Martinez

the muse is magnetic,
drawing words to the surface
by her presence or even the glimmer of,
she commands those subatomic scales
with electrodynamic fingertips,
weaving and composing
rules and laws at her smokey whim.

a network of sensory overload,
quick pulses in the current
that bring about a need,
a longing intrinsic to creation itself,
a desire to release
those strobes of wildness, of rhythmic streams
of stanzas, sonnets and songs.

her angular momentum takes over
and the penstroke runs off the page
as if the ink has come alive,
a native element of dark possibility
that is consumed by her will
and has fled its point of origin
for fear of being buried
beneath a series of pages,
gone on in to the world without
to find her and to cultivate
its own defining by way of her energy.

she exists within the vacuum
where all things are formed
and lends to it her cosmic forces,
special relativity
and quantum-mechanical soul
and there it all begins to expand
like a swelling heart,
on and on and out and out
until the seamless black fabric of the void
is stretched beyond its elastic limit
and there is an explosion of sound and fire,
theories, matter and antimatter
as galaxies spiral out and grow arms
and stars breathe the first breath
of their strange and violent lives,
glowing and revealing the outlying regions
where the words dance and live and breed.

-S.C. Martinez

on the highway smell of rain on asphalt,
scent of the earth’s sweat against man’s doing,
taste of iron in the air.

call in to question the prior years to this,
the cigarettes and the rum and phantoms,
pills to keep the head straight
and night after night of insidious terror,
feeling of madness and egomania,
the blood contains within it tiny evil elementals
that creep through every vessel
to defeat our mild attempts at this,
as if some deeds by our ancestors were so terrible
that our lineage is forever cursed
to bear the burden of their punishment.

dirty hearts and finances,
dull columns rising forever from her fingers,
watching this all from afar
then drinking quietly in the dark,
in the car, the sting of future trauma
through a vibrating soul thread,
suicide and dollar signs,
cancer and debt, genius and slow remove.

a derelict of social behavior
and a recluse of normal human condition,
further into the night
through the bedroom door
the sound of her taste,
the shouting of these bored words
as the blue dawn washes,
a dark figure flanked by deep inebriation,
a habit familiar like an old flame
burning with or without tinder,
with or without a spark.

bright sounds spark frequencies,
back and forth dialect
i want more than anything to understand,
sleep at some point getting older,
sleep at some point sleep,
slow and unintelligent, confusing,
dreams of strange origin,
a feline presence watching me wander
the odd corridors of the id,
a fluid form moving through the night
untouched by pointless mutants
that need not exist.

here is the place where life is strange,
it hovers autonomous and pulsing
in the grayness of what lies between
the inner and the outer,
the sun sets and we stumble
into what quadrants of the world will have us,
we are men now
for we have murdered the child within.

-S.C. Martinez

to purge ourselves of that which is most troubling
we must partake of it completely,
devour every last atom of its terrible force,
succumb to the mounting war within
against the dead feeling from that masochism.

so it is then, here i am then,
fatigued by a conflict i wish only to be free of,
assault upon assault to further quell this feeling
and so it is then, here i am then,
never sleeping, racing the sun up and down.

the time here is spent drawing lines on the earth,
arrows and x’s and ways around mountains,
all in an effort to catch the enemy off guard,
to drown their forces in a howling maelstrom
of sudden defeat bearing all manner of deadly ideas.

there are no victors here, not within the broad strokes
and squall lines of this war,
there are only the maimed and idiot infantry of my heart
stranded in smoke and remote confusion,
never sleeping, never knowing, racing the sun up and down.

there is no growth here, not among the brass
and brains of this war,
there are only brief moments of passing insight
before memory removes it as if it never was
and we are left standing on the shore of these sands,
great principles lost in the muck of engagement,
great warriors with dirty faces fighting hour upon hour
to keep the soul from collapsing in on itself
and i will consume the earth and all its conflicts
before i give in to this.

-S.C. Martinez

well the air smells like sadness
and it can’t get dark fast enough,
the alarm clock keeps pulling at my shirt
and nicotine rings keep knocking
at my front door,
it’s hard to stay hid.

the rum lets itself in while i’m out
and really i can’t turn it away,
so, you know, it kind of lives here
and refuses to pick up after itself,
leaves the lights on
and refuses to help pay the rent.

thats the way it is though,
and i know, you know,
i walk place to place
and day to day
and sundays are the worst,
you know, sunday nights
are covered in fog
to conceal whats around the corner,
you know,
sundays are there to define
the rest of the days.

they keep saying its gonna rain
and i keep seeing lightning
but the ground stays dry
and it’s hot, goddamn it’s hot,
the pavement hisses and steams
and the air wraps around you
like an old coat
and there is no wind, no wind,
someone forgot to tell the wind.

but you know, we walk around,
the rum and i,
and the cigarette lags behind
calling wait up, goddamn,
gotta light em on the stove,
someone forgot to tell the matches.

i’m all out of water
and i’ll be dead
before i drink from the faucet here,
and i’ll be dead
after i drink from the faucet here,
so, you know, it’s just me and the drink
and sugar water and cigarettes and burners,
bad dreams and hot nights,
hot days, cold showers,
here and there, back and forth,
now and then.

the night lumbers on
and the words talk shit from just beyond
and it’s hard to stay hid, you know,
we harbor no solstice here and yet
it’s hard to stay hid, city to city
banking along the edge of the night,
i know you know,
it’s hard to stay hid
when you carry this kind of weight,
it’s hard to stay hid
when you want to be alone, you know,
it’s hard to stay hid
until you want to be found.

-S.C. Martinez

i burn memory like a photograph,
the image distorts and curls in on itself
like a dying insect
until it is gone completely.

i chase down those dreams
where unwanted spectres reside
and snuff them out
until they are gone completely.

monoaural misfit, nonforgiving sound,
i bury the haunting resonance
and soft whispers under silence
until they are gone completely.

the tired hours in the presence of none,
for all the world completely alone
like those poems you referenced
as pointing to sadness
but were in fact passion and longing.

drifting in and out of this,
a footnote in other people’s histories,
a common memory recognized after the fact,
after this has been weighed
and measured and puzzled over,
a stranger living among them
quietly standing just outside the frame,
nodding and smiling disingenuously,
waiting out the minutes
until it was deemed acceptable to retreat
back to the reclusive tremor
from which i emerged.

i live quietly now without the clamor
but still among the squalor,
i shed light like a creature of the night
shuddering the hard truth of day,
beleaguered like a merchant
condemned to carry all the weight
of this life’s redundancy,
emerging thus some primal thing
hot and aching and determined
to remove all that this world possesses.

i will bleed my heart of every fucking word
before this is over,
i will tear down the image and the sound
until it is gone completely.

-S.C. Martinez

burn like van gogh,
fire like fire
and flame of flame,
the skin crawls
like curling smoke
and there is only,
only the sitting through it
like ritual atonement.

the slow toil
of skin on paper,
the rush of magnetic words
pulling heart and head
toward its centrifugal force,
spinning night on night
around some fevered reckoning
not understood at this now,
powerless but to follow
for fear of combustion.

i practiced with sad songs
and mixed feelings,
years in the company
of blue efforts
and low mercy,
agony spilling forth
from out these rapid eyes
and in through outward behavior,
fighting against all logic
the threat of peace
and the act of contrition.

-S.C. Martinez

i waited hours and hours for the rain
and i could see the birds by my window
making small calculations
and drawing out plans against the sky
for how this would change things
but it never came.
it sent the clouds ahead to survey
and the storm gears ground
and thunder was sound
yet ultimately the rain decided
not to come today
and so the gears ground in reverse
and the sound was thunder still
until the clouds moved apart
and on ahead to find
some more suitable part of the earth
where some more suitable man and birds do exist
and my feathered associates tilted their heads
this way and that and redrew their plans
and scratched out their small calculations
with the ends of their wings
and skittered on to follow the clouds
and though i elected to stay
and waited hours and hours for the rain
it never came.

-S.C. Martinez

what do i do here
with none to play with,
in the transient hours
there is nothing other
than this, where have you gone
with wings of fire
and smoke on your lips,
murder in your heart
and swagger in your hips.

this is what the night is then,
stars with strange skittering madness
i cannot comprehend,
dancing through the waters above
like god’s bright thoughts
while i slowly glide
round and around
and across this quiet earth.

what wisdom is hidden there
beyond their velvet crawl,
what canopy from infinity
will adjust to this argonaut
with thoughts dark and eyes bright
tunneling back and forth
from the edge of the earth
to the center of the night.

-S.C. Martinez