words

i am of two parts,
the day and night.

in the light i burn with guilt
from deeds long since expired
and those that have never passed;
i move through the hours a simpleton,
ignoring the calling
and the hunger,
sweating out each movement on the clock
until the night arrives
and in the dark hours i am wise,
in company with demons
i coalesce the outer with the inner,
a shared medium in accordance
with an order beyond word or reason,
the traces of my genius
cover the discernible world
like old dreams called back from the long ago.

this acrimonious affair
has the makings of a blood feud,
the boiling of our love
has surpassed us both in all but temper,
and so i bid farewell
to the savage and irrevocable deeds
of your ethos,
your despair and your hope
and your greater abhorrent behaviors.

you are but god’s great failure,
you suck the marrow from history
and the blood from the earth
and wallow in your own gluttonous excrement
like some deranged warlord mad with blood,
your soul is now glass
and you are no longer real,
you will cross all fates
and in all such quests be rejected
back to the horror from which you were produced.

-S.C. Martinez

have you found your morphine drip, father,
have you clawed your way at last
from the terrors of that jungle, that deep conflict,
where so many souls did burn
and congeal again as lost principles
in the napalm of your breath,
did you war your way to heaven
where the fathers of our fathers were turned away
in agony, their hearts too blackened
by the fires of this world.

you are a giant,
with long strides you crossed oceans,
continents, ideas,
my blood housed in yours.

and here now words fail me.

-S.C. Martinez

other worlds than this,
other prayers and solemn gestures than these,
other voices that speak stranger
and absolute, with a ferocity
like untamed lions devouring the night,
feeble and newborn,
one eye a pale crescent,
almost not there.

are there other fixtures
that cling to the vault of heaven
and mark progress in the scheme of things,
the marching and chanting,
the idols wound through bony fingers
with skin like blue paper
nearly betraying the blood,
almost not there.

are there other souls that burn
that border on abstract,
a lightness to them
as if one breath would carry them off
into the beyond,
consumed by the unknown
until they are but peripheral reflections
existing only in rumor and myth,
almost not there.

with each breath
the gravity of some forever axis
draws closer these worlds
to a convergence,
cosmic power struggles
of unforeseen consequence,
the aggregate of all thought,
the penance for reading god’s mind,
this purgatory slowly draws to a close
until it is almost not there at all.

S.C. Martinez

there is a wildness on the street,
a leopard mentality of machinery
and mathematics devised
to replace spoken word with
that of the phantom tongue,
the mind’s rhetoric devoid of purpose.

a miserable assortment of movement
from here and back again,
endless the call to arms
of fat eyed malignance that draws
on wasted breath, call it what it is,
an excess of baleful moments,
incontinent to the bone
the hand that draws the weapon.

the world slick with rain,
the red light reflection
like blood omens
in the natural order of things,
the brown withered hand
of nature in her lonely recourse,
the lost cause of living
a faded project in the hands
of failed contractors in white collars,
digging the graves of progress
with a passive indifference to all else.

it is what it is,
the gaping maw of everything
delivered forth like an elder subrogate
forced into this lament
wild and reeking of defiance
with eyes that follow every turn
the true pattern of fixity.

the conqueror, the victors,
men with bloodstained memories
and hearts that no longer retain
within them the compassion
for any other, alone but for
the company of greed,
like terrible transgressions
against the most basic of all law,
they have devoured the milk of
her age and consumed her breast entire,
no words to recall the ancients,
no reversing the knowledge of what can be done.

-S.C. Martinez

bored and dirty,
i wish i could play piano
and clean up my act.

slow thoughts, slow movement,
eyes closed for moments strung together
with threads of smoke,
my hands will never cease.

i’d like a drink, thank you,
but i’d not move now for any thrist,
not for blood,
not for love,
float here alone and quiet, very quiet.

the television says nothing,
it is blue and impassive,
the telephone rests,
you ponder my sanity
but i will tell you,
i will tell you all things are relative,
none more so than this.

i feel brilliant but know better,
still, it all belongs to me now,
this moment and all moments alike,
the sun has gone from me at my request,
and the moon is likely dead somewhere
over the ocean,
the waves are still before the fear,
the shoreline panic that i have put there
for a change, bored of the common way,
tired of the same faces
and the same words
and sounds and skies and roads,
i have built my own
and i have seen through god’s eyes,
i have writ this place
before it was ever read,
close your eyes,
close your eyes,
close them before the moment passes
or someone takes it away.

-S.C. Martinez

it has craned its helixed neck
and found cellular towns on the horizon
to move over like dark clouds of fury,
madness, the storms of ageless transgression.

microinhabitants, eyes to the thunderheads
with curious wonder, electric thought
betrayed by electric non-thought,
it spreads its phobia over your town
and the world becomes born again
in a new and confusing light.

aerial onslaught from new heaven,
tongues hang loose and dumb
and spines curve crazed and confused
in retaliation of this inner world circus.

encephalitic nation depraved and wild,
fear the water and turn inward the flight
from self, dig deep the chasm of your terrible heart,
beating fast now slow, fast now slow,
your small soul has failed to reach that space
between the inevitable and the impossible,
and it has torn itself writhing
from out your mortal trappings,
consumed by a fire ancient and ethereal
and issuing soundless columns of smoke
into the skyline of your first home.

you were born with this,
it lay dormant in your temporal attic
until some agent with red arms
came crawling through the trap door,
bearing flowers and a black tongue,
his cerebral dialect paralytic
and much like a childhood night terror,
your estate is now possessed
by this transient reaper of wasted life.

-S.C. Martinez

i have wrestled with colossi
that once were dear friends,
broke them down and pulled them apart,
studied them, examined their massive structure
and cataloged the intricate detail
of their architecture, yet still,
i know nothing of their hearts,
i have failed to fool them of my importance.

and so i sit in pale blue rooms
making faces in the dark,
slinging expletives at these terribly impassive walls,
brief moments of passion erupting
from far within
and expiring in the heavy atmosphere
of this transient vessel,
slow moving hearse bearing the dead
that suffer from life,
yet to succumb to the great encounter,
the lonely war.

unkempt and solitary,
afoul of other creatures,
the hours consume the flesh and mind,
outside the traffic of insects
move tirelessly on invisible highways,
a deep madness breaks within the blood
unsettling all avenues of perception,
small metropolis choking the light,
moths circling madly in strange drunken orbits
conspiring in their insidious manner
to steal from that imprisoned sun,
sedated flame of what unfathomable power,
now and again fireflies
passing in the void without,
glowing and vanishing
like cosmic phenomena in stellar metaphor,
a cruel laughter in those burning effigies
possessing false stars briefly
then sucked away into depthless antimatter.

bizarre to keep such small company
but i prefer their view of things,
a behavior sensible and without motive
other than that which the light has placed in them,
free from the confines of men’s hearts
and the squalid savagery of lesser beasts,
wholly comprised by an endless lust,
a timeless pursuit of radiance
even if they must merge with flame
that will devour wing and spirit,
pull them back into that dark substance
from which they once emerged.

-S.C. Martinez

you are doomed to walk this earth
child of heaven,
lyric of the cosmos.

alabaster star,
burning without govern or cause,
wrinkling the space before it
an epicentrum
in the great black heart of everything,
the pulsating vein of eternity.

the woven gestures of creation
still hang in the space between spaces,
the shape and sound something unfathomable
lost in the lonely recess of spirit,
the soul a tiny model of the universe without,
electric and alive and
forever cursed to die and bear life again
like one prisoner to an infinite loop
of self-impregnating lunacy.

the mathematics devised here
are but fingerprints of god’s work,
the first pass at worlds
meant to exist beyond the reach
of his terrifying gaze,
to align in their own wicked divinations
some pattern of patternless monument,
his voice and his thought
a phantom from an ether dream,
choking on the dark matter
of his own strange discretions.

-S.C. Martinez

i can smell the change in the air
and i fear its coming,
the strangeness of it
arriving before the thing itself,
pressing its stigmata upon all sight,
pulling the light from sundowns
and turning it a pale alien blue,
something unseen in this life
and unwelcome.

write this feeling down,
record it among the pillars
of all history
and above all worship its incantation
no matter the form it has assumed,
this ritual of heathen sacrifice
must be repeated in order to be whole,
they will know if you do not,
they will see.

the head has become a prison,
its inner walls covered with the scrawled inanity
of countless maniacs
and their dead logic,
their false reason,
their empty markings now etched
into the universe itself,
unsold to any who would dare purchase
those words of wildness
forever preserved
among the metamorphic heart of life,
the beating requisite of space,
a celestial phenomenon without origin
or destination
but indisputable in the manner of having been,
the aggregate incomplete
without its brief bright moment,
pulsating there for none to see
but those with the right eyes.

-S.C. Martinez

the soul it burns like arson,
a flicker in the cosmic blink of things,
split between realities that are there
and those that have yet to be forged
from the dreams of sleeping gods,
a river flush with the wrinkled reflection
of coastal cities or sudden catastrophes
born from an absence of having anything
better to do, man’s primal need
to build and destroy in alternating breaths.

testing the waters with timid fingertips,
fearful of a sudden plunge again
into the depths of your own image,
forced to reckon with the makings
of internal strife, burnt out
even in this early run of life,
before any significance can be salvaged
from the wreckage of your voice,
the lesser species sifting through you
searching for a common thread
with which to stitch their fate to yours,
the threadwork of the almighty
now coarse and undone,
see-through in places it is so worn thin.

-S.C. Martinez