words

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

i miss the concrete
as much as i thought it impossible,
i find myself vacant here
in all but wonder,
i encounter great savagery
and idiot tyrants
and this is what my world has become,
a circus of this, of these,
i dream of spiders and cruel women
and i awake to roaches and emptiness.

i sit in the sun to feel something,
to escape the closing in
of these eggshell walls
and old tenant smell,
of neighbor sounds
like muffled canine moans.

i long for dialogue,
much as i thought it impossible,
i long for discussion
and laughter, christ,
how i miss the laughter,
it is as if this corner of the world
turns only by hostility and madness
and would otherwise pull the earth
around its core,
they know nothing of violins,
they do not feel the wind,
there is only anger and mediocrity.

i yearn for misunderstood touch,
encounters on younger nights
as a young man struggled
to find some thread
with which to unravel
the finer patchwork of this,
wrestling enchanting women
older and younger
who spoke in parable and praise,
who spoke of remorse
and hammered out sadness
night after night in their own way
all the while preparing
for the world to end
on the edge of eyelash regret.

i feel a pulse once again
and though i sit quietly alone
watching the universe rip and tear
itself apart and reacclimate
i feel a sense of meaning
in these words as they remit
to my fingers a need to create
as violently as to destroy,
with grit teeth and bleeding eyes,
a Mozart impulse in inmate reason,
slashing and cutting letter for letter
from out the chrome heart of everything.

-S.C. Martinez

i find that i have lost some things
and my teeth are all rotting,
my gut is wide with excess
and though i trimmed the fat
from my habits
the flesh will not fade.

my blood is all washed out
and i sleep in doom and sweat
and i know, i know
you find this weak and uninspired
but the truth resides deep
within the etching of these letters,
the soul within the sound they make
like the clawed entrapment
of bitter genius and newborn rhythm.

my words will live through fire
and the ones i left behind
will burn on and on and on
and they will dream in smoke,
they will thrive in charred repose
and those grey walls will remember
the hours i breathed great spumes of ash
and wrestled with flame.

-S.C. Martinez

and the demons said when i woke up this morning,
“wash yo hair in the sink today!”
and i did, and i did,
with my head upside down
touching the basin with
the shampoo whirlpool and the sucking sound
at the bottom of the drain…

so i did, and i did,
and then i went about my day
until the demons said,
“don’t pay your bills no moe!”
and i said goddammit go away,
i got things to do, leave me alone, leave me alone,
but they didn’t, and i don’t
pay my bills no moe
and the letters keep piling up
and i keep throwing them away
and the phone keeps ringing off the goddamn hook
and i keep pushing it away…

and then later on i was feeling good
until i heard a little drum
as the words dripped like piss
all down my corpus callosum,
“go to the cemetery and dig up the dead!”
but i said no, mutherfuckers,
get the fuck up out my head!

well, they politely declined, you know how it is,
it never ends, it never ends,
again and again and again,
it never ends, it never ends,
again and again and again…

and so i found myself at the graveyard
digging up the dead,
midnight shovel samba
and thoughts composed of lead,
brittle bones and long hair,
old suits and linen gowns,
fingernails and barren sockets
and not another soul in town,
man what a night, what a night…

and the next morning i awoke
with the bones that i had found
and the police man stood above me
with his pistola pointed down
and i thought aaaah shit,
he looks upset
and he probably won’t understand
so i rolled that old rotary dial
at the back of my head
and i said GET ME OUT OF HERE
and they cackled and they howled
and they said “you on your own here bub
you better call yo lawyer down!”

well, shit. i made a judgment call
and i was cuffed and booked and screened
and an army of loud questions
drew down upon the scene
and it got heavy, boy it got thick,
my collar grew too tight
and the sweat began to drip
and man they just didn’t understand
those little red bastards
with their little molten hands…

it never ends, it never ends,
again and again and again,
it never ends, it never ends,
again and again and again.

i was charged and i stood trial
and i was found to be insane
and on the day that i was sentenced
i smiled and i exclaimed
i said LORD THANK YA JESUS LOWD JESUS
THANK YA OW LOWD FO SAVIN ME,
THE DEVIL HAD HIS WAY
AND NOW THANK YOU LOWD I’M FREE!
but everyone just shook their heads
and the gavel came down hard
and the judge spoke low like thunder
when he leveled out his charge
he said you sick boy, god can’t hear your cries
and if it was up to me, boy you better believe
i’d be seein you fry
but i smiled and i said nothing
cus i knew the lord was at my side…

two years and twenty days,
i wore white and did my time,
the demons never spoke
and every day i wore a smile
and on the day they let me out
i hummed a little hymn
and the lord winked from behind the sun
and i tipped my hat at him
and on the way home,
the clouds moved in and the wind began to moan
and the clitter clatter in my head
preceded a voice that wasn’t my own
and it said “welcome back, click clack,
now go cut up all your kin!”
aaaaah man, it never ends, it never ends…
again and again and again, it never ends,
it never ends…
again and again and again.

-S.C. Martinez

i feel solemnly naked here
in this repetition,
dripping sweat loudly
underneath this awful sun
for now that she has gone
she took shade and atmosphere
and left me with this burning coil
where my heart once lived.

this is climate where men fight lions
and murder one another should some god
be watching, for surely this is worse
than any hell that exists
and what reprieve must be granted
for we who do bad things.

i dream of her every night
and in every dream she is the same,
there, knowing, helping me through
the languid hours, pointing me
from moment to moment
but never does she touch me
or even speak my name,
never does she touch me,
never does she touch me.

i have felt this quiet before
and it is shocking
in its finality year after year
that i visit these steps
and i must shake with madness
and i must go up and up
and i must hobble limb for limb
along this broken bastard theory.

-S.C. Martinez

solitude is not the killer,
it is the silence, the darkness,
the world without your laughter
and your light
that is incomprehensible.

there is a quickness to my heart now
that will not subside
and it is in your absence
that i find myself paralyzed,
stricken with fear
at the idea of moving through this life
without your lovely hand
and your wild eyes.

i am consumed by the choices i have made
and the shadows here now are harsh
and jagged and the lack of wind
augments the heat of my choices
and the burning infects my head
in moments such as this
where there is nothing but the night
and your memory in it, so real
it nearly forms itself
against the shallow wall of pretending
you do not still exist
somewhere in this world.

and god, the savagery was so intense
and now in the calm i can barely breathe
without the violent plumes of smoke
and the fumes and mad eyes avoiding mine,
i am quietly engaged in a war
against my own methods and i listen
to the same song over and over again,
my heart the war drum
beating out battle cries
that are no longer returned or even heard
by your distant armies.

-S.C. Martinez

breaking pills in half
becomes the way to stay alive,
to hold off the long fingers
of poverty and obsession,
keep the inevitable at arm’s length
for a moment more
and it is all i can do
not to run straight for the sun
with arms like serpents
and skin of flame and angst.

take the words away
and i cease to beat out sparks
from the notched surface of this anvil heart
and i tie off the passage of passion,
left slow and spitting pharmaceutical dust
from between the gaps in my teeth.

i’ll go quiet, i’ll refrain,
i’ll make easy the movement
of others through the tangled canopy
of my savage indictment against the world,
i’ll nod and smile and shake hands
but in my head buried deep beneath
the blanket of medicine fraud
there is only lust and sirens.

-S.C. Martinez

i’m so tired, so tired,
i sleep 10 hours and still
i’m unbearably slow, rolling
out of bed and crawling
into the shower, scolding
hot water for 20 minutes
turning dead skin to steam
and still i can’t wake up,
i dream little dreams of waterfalls
and soap bubble spaceships
while the stink and grime
from last night runs down my legs
and collects in a shallow mess
at the base of the tub,
swirling flat galaxies of filth and waste,
i press my face against the tile
and sleep for a few more minutes
but still i’m so tired.

i drive to work at 70 miles an hour,
weaving in and out of traffic,
wishing death upon those who
do not understand the subtleties
of traffic, the narrow corridor brotherhood
of getting from one place to the next
as quickly as possible,
not driving 10 miles below the speed limit,
moving OVER when the person coming up behind you
is clearly gaining, gaining, now slowing,
inches away from your bumper because you
won’t MOVE OVER,
the dance with highway patrol radar sweeps,
the quick kick to the brake
when that black and white presence
is conjured out of the gray skin of the road,
i move through these facts at the same speed
despite my terrible fatigue.

i sit in a very comfortable chair, black fake leather,
a high back and it leans
with the weight of my drooping eyes,
i can see now little angels, pearly,
phosphorescent with their little wings
riding on little antelopes
pulling my eyelashes down, dragging my eyelids
down, tiny michelangelos
painting thin red nerves
against the whites of my eyes,
i nod and my head snaps back, then forward,
eyes wide for a moment, back then forward
eyes wide for a moment, i want to sleep for days
within the red house of fluvoxamine,
the calm ease with which it removes
my wild and uncontrollable characters,
the hemingways, the pollacks,
and replaces them with slow witted idiots,
men with no spirit who hide behind sweater vests
and picket fences and i grow tired
even of this expenditure and i wish only to sleep.

-S.C. Martinez

i listen to the low hum of all the things we own
and i want them to stop, everything to cease,
all motors whir to an end and
be still and quiet and cold,
blend in with the silence and the night.

i want the dark, i want the sun,
fire, effigies and lightning spider veins,
water on gasoline and the pounding
of fist on stone, a heart beat in rock formations,
feet in the dirt and new stars burning
where city lights once bloomed.

i want my sleep to be vulgar in its finality
and only disturbed by nearing predators,
passing spectres on their way to some other poem,
i want to measure the days by heart
and weather the nights both stoic and mean,
with grit teeth and caged fire eyes
collecting the gloom like fireflies
to quiet this dumb maniac within.

-S.C. Martinez