words

vinegar over water,
bleach,
her breasts are but pale symphonies,
concerto of flesh and want,
thighs soft as moonlight,
the slender dance of her spine
pulsing through electric skin,
the warm depths of her,
the endless river of her.

she is botany from a drunken god,
a flower of laughter,
a string orchestra,
wild and erotic
and buried by her past,
she knows this world
by touch alone,
a martyr of intoxicant plethora,
a gale force wind,
tropic miasma.

lyric conflagration,
burning effigy of other
less demented spirits
forged together here,
this unholy fixture of sexual enterprise,
this model from years gone,
this young girl who carries souls
carelessly in solemn little jars.

-S.C. Martinez

acolyte,
move close,
get back,
burn it burn it
burn it burn it,
vilify me like a pagan god
then get close,
move back,
let your fingers drift
across the ends of the bed
now come close,
drop back,
burn it burn it
burn it burn it
like a paper god
then slide closer,
draw back,
pick-axe woman,
hair trigger,
a touch closer,
further back,
baby these walls bleed pretty,
too pretty,
pull me close,
push me back,
cross me like the sun of god
then lean closer,
fall back,
the pen is death,
the blood is had,
move closer,
get closer,
now back,
farther back,
out the door,
dead gone.

-S.C. Martinez

do you feel the eyes upon you
when you sleep in your bed,
do you share this country
of inward dreams,
are you alive or just pretending.

are you a pale gift or ransom;
don’t pretend, don’t brave nothingness
for the sake of boredom,
you bloom in this dead season
whether or not you wish for it.

don’t sell the world from under you,
don’t pardon me;
my love and hate run parallel
and danger close,
often touching for a beat,
a brief burst of portent stimuli.

my hand in your hair
is poetry from far greater poets
and words shy from my pen
as i hasten to capture them,
to capture you,
this moment, all moments.

i am rain in summer,
i am a nocturnal moth,
i bleed doom and drink strangeness
and i care for little
yet my heart is great
with injustice
and it never rests.

this vernacular of skin and teeth
holds demure rhythm,
an element of its own accordance,
caustic bond of blood and nerve,
a shiver,
soft escape of breath,
a shudder,
depraved resistance,
a ritual letting of divine commerce.

you are an hourglass
in a house of clockwork,
a sun dial bearing the
circumferential swing of pendulums,
i a monster of slow motion,
steam engine derelict,
a passable machine of little effort.

i am the continental divide,
the spine of the earth,
a raving concord of day and night
with cancer wielding hands,
a superstition,
tarot card,
a creature of consequence and regress,
prose you may soon neglect,
words you will one day forget.

-S.C. Martinez

i fear the volume of it,
i fear the solubility of it,
i fear the coming of all this buried wrath
upon some underwritten squall
should i drown myself
in its effluent conspiring.

here god’s hand rests mirthless
over the earth,
waiting to close heavy fist
and stir the dust of his makings
at my transgression.

i fear the combat in it,
i fear the resonance,
i fear the prophetic rise
of what has been written
and what has passed before,
eons of old smoke and muttering,
the cause of so much paranoid drifting,
ageless phenomena,
backward dialect
with no room for logic.

i long for slantwise sun vapors
through foreign trees
and still rivers in the night
catching stars in their ruminations,
holding them to the surface,
the myriad blinking of unseated brilliance
to mock my wayward solace.

i fear the instinct,
i fear the amber tones of its liquid form,
i fear the vessel of its conception
in my soul’s unthreading,
a space in my liver still reserved
for its warm embrace,
the cool following of its arrival,
the profound reason it bestows
upon this languid shell
and the acidic genius it augments.

-S.C. Martinez

i am a burning god,
a lightswept devil
moving out from the night
all smoke and flame
like one bereft of decency,
a casual observer
to this depraved congress,
this odd circumstance.

through the gray veins of dawn
i rode the sunrise up
and watched it sear the darkness away
and paint the world about
with cars and roadsigns
and trees and insomniatic raving,
a black mass of birds
conjured from the night
to keep watch over this stretch of day,
beating heavy and dissipating
into singular agents of flight,
tilting and flaying the selfsame twilight
i watched congregate in your eyes
in rapid velvet strobes;
i move toward the morning
like a fugitive in negative repose
fleeing some immense greatness
that elicits a heart within my heart.

the sun sat the edge of the world,
liquid fire burning there
red and ubiquitous,
could i but match its brightness,
this angry eye of heaven
fuming burnt orange rumor
of other worlds,
higher still and silver,
i come apart in this light,
a supposition of something greater,
unraveling strands of arachnid architecture
watching this daybreak
bleed itself of night’s hallowed seizure,
yet still i am but an anchorite
apart from this odd circumstance
that i feel such strong compulsion
to document and to destroy.

-S.C. Martinez

your heart is drawn in blood and drink,
a novel of idiocy,
some antic mutant of yourself.

the years between us,
i thought you purged
from the ledger in my head;
your very presence is tremulant
with lunacy and old regret,
what a mess you’ve become.

departed girl,
your youth has gone on
and here now a woman
with dead eyes and pale skin,
a heart that beats slow and with great fear,
is this how you thought it would be?

this moral leprosy has stolen you
from sanctuary;
this way is sovereign
and you must go elsewhere
and bother other, less broken men.

-S.C. Martinez

those obsidian obelisks of genetic masonry
pushed small red devils
through the birth canal of this impetuous womb,
the old way, head and heart aflame.

they grew with great love
from materials forged of anti-worlds,
tooth and nail and hysteria,
maniacal musings and slick laughter,
the hackles of amused doom
in those oddly pale and tranquil eyes.

a fist of the earth
this hell convex and naked of mystery
still wearing the placenta
of incestuous guilt,
the fucking and the fighting,
warring and preaching,
all linear and lacking parent axes,
just exposed and strange and new.

her heart combusted like sudden riots,
the makings of those years gone
and now only ripples remained,
the epicenter long expired,
embracing in a clouded room of strangers
coalescing there like children in darkness,
grasping for some hold on the world
and the way of things,
the taste of what this night would bring,
skin soft and delicate
wrapped in this covenant,
warriors of old testament principle
so antiquated were the eyes that watched them there.

lust in this hour, no room for other sins,
the onerous ghost of love trailed slow and melancholy
from moment to moment with glaring disapproval,
all in due course the death of those devils
will bring about a sadness absolute;
they are freedom in raw form like clay dolls
lacking rule or logic and adhering
only to primal warfare,
the lord himself must be raised and crossed again
before these acts will be forgotten.

-S.C. Martinez

the lightness, mercurial lobes
caught in webs suspended above all caring
dripping slow and heavy like beads of honey,
like ropes of heroin.

you lack origin,
a rumor, a pale spectre in the fire chasm of my heart,
sundered by separation
i crave your presence,
your exterior,
your velvet reflection in my terrible eyes,
something to grip and sustain
the false nightmares of youth,
the flesh it beckons
through time and space like abstract hauntings.

you move slow in my memory
as if struggling against the gravity
of your consistency,
your pale visage paints these mirrored walls
with vibrancy, your form,
whether false or corporeal
is of no consequence;
there is no difference here.

the strangeness i adore,
you have bloomed in anterior order
deciduous like late winter blossoms,
you alone in this ephemeral conclave
possess within your heart
the blueprint to this madness.

-S.C. Martinez

oh lord,
where have you gone from here.
oh lord
can’t you smell the sulphur
predicate my coming,
oh lord
can’t you hear the sin
beating dark in my heart,
the acrid tones of my bitterness,
the vulcanization of my thoughts,
the ego of my ego
and the shade of my approach
moving before me like carbonic witness,
can’t you feel this love,
the ink smears at this 11th hour,
the turbine engine of your earth
sputtering low and ominous
like dogs on the prowl,
the muted whisper of these winds of war
crank this perverse machination forward
bearing the blueprint of your violent genes
that hang about in aftermath
and dissipate in the ether,
the firmament shroud remote and hollow,
this empty gesture.
oh lord
your hands bear no residue of this mess
you’ve left us in.
oh lord
the echo of your laughter is haunting
and how it lingers,
your voice is lost in this din of madness,
this world will swallow us whole,
this world will bury us deep,
this world will cease its turning
and our orbit will escape the gravity
of your impetuous hands.
oh lord,
where is your crook and your sunburst,
where have you gone from here.

-S.C. Martinez

cars on the highway,
i can hear them in the night
and i am alone,
my words become knives,
its all i can do
not to weep in the dark
before the leaves and the wind,
a solitary figure
smoking cigarettes,
scratching my burning throat,
the loneliness
covers you like a coat,
even the insects leave me here,
stray cats pursue other avenues
and conspire in their slurred thinking,
self imposed asylum,
a perfect night for drinking
and the stars have gone,
there is no one to tell
of this sad broken man
with his aching bones
and sour breath,
breathing smoke like souls in hell,
alone but for the cars
on the road.

-S.C. Martinez