words

often in the night i can hear him call out,
i don’t know to whom.

his restless heart beats in an endless struggle
against the confines of whiskey bottles
and pain killers and solemn opinions and
all other manner of maddening things.

a father who once held death in his hands
like a black-haired reaper,
in quiet disposition slung over his shoulder
as if it weighed less than all the world,
spitting fire and opium-driven commands
to decimate all manner of foreign faculty
with the savagery of old testament vengeance.

the years of then now a memory he cannot dismiss,
he has tried to destroy that part of himself,
to rid the world of that part of itself,
to reverse the action of things once committed
can never be undone,
but like the markings of ancient men
those things are writ in stone.

-S.C. Martinez

out in the night,
lightning,
waves of it behind half-clouds
conjure memories not belonging
to any living thing one
but of the whole,
the passing of things
in the dark.

the macrocosm,
the aggregate that stills
all questioning and motive,
a voice beyond reckoning,
a singular point to draw from,
inward the quiet that has
quelled from without.

a suppression,
there is little to do
in the scarring of this mountain,
it is of itself a thing
with which to wrestle,
to spend years in such vain struggle
to bring down that which has no axis,
no symmetry to identify.

a brilliance,
lost in the vault of space,
judgments lacking a judge,
all worlds formed by the intersections
of opposing moments,
your memory a slight against the rain-slicked eves
of a childhood you are still rooted in.

-S.C. Martinez

the warmth consumes, it envelopes
your spine like a virus
and you have let it in,
the feline presence of your womb
this pale november flesh it sheds,
the towers of your yesterday
yield emptiness, empty
of the heart and empty of the hand,
the brother welding to your home
a line that cannot be broken,
a stake that cannot be unearthed,
the depth perception of your words
spread about like feigned interest,
like waves it has returned
from a shore you can’t recall,
an island cannibal tribe
that has sold the secrets of your work
and swallowed the wealth
of your undertaking,
in emergency rooms
the memory of your shiver
clings to those walls
and to those paper beds,
you were not alive but you
were nearly dead, the months that followed
a hazard of faith and false vestige,
clinging to the remnants of a world
your father created with his bloody hands
and sad eyes, the broken back of his labor
the wings of your promise,
your clean feet above the ground
and free of all the normal weights
that dragged the others about,
that held them to the anchors
of their own strange genetics,
the wildness of your eyes
reflected deep within the strangeness
of your spirit,
like the buffalo you have used it entire
and like the buffalo you have faded.

-S.C. Martinez

the world casts a smile
about that painted face,
this midnight leper a lesson
of some other then,
a warning for some more present now.

look at me from across the road,
from beneath the shadow,
appear before me as a word
lacking some common definition,
something of a parable
unwritten by the hand,
genetic prose within the mind.

your foreign shiver in the night,
your wretched lumber through the dark,
you feared the message contained within
a heartbeat and like some failed
vestige of that permanent order
you did succumb to the wickedness
of your own labor,
the paralytic laughter of such hilarity
not lost on the patients of that fatigue.

you phantasm, you spectral cancer,
i have smelled your rotten odor
and i have consumed your wasted flesh,
i have chased you through the damp
of morning and into the sundown
of the evening, and still
you have eluded me like some
thing unreal and without substance,
like a dream or a fantasy
or some other reason for this.

-S.C. Martinez

the dogs,
biting the air at their backs
as they fled from headlights,
looking back at those eyes,
a gaze that covered their world
brilliant and blinding and wide,
those canine tongues that lolled
and panting lungs,
the delicate ribcage shivers
as they narrowly cleared the crossing
that would nearly be their last,
these dogs of ancient trek,
these hounds of laborious tandem.

-S.C. Martinez

this mortal vessel betrays you,
this temporary thing.

it has failed, broken,
you shout to quiet
the voices within,
the corrupt idols
of your own creation
that have made you this way,
your sad bastard way about.

where is the question now,
the lines of reason having
absolved the when and why
of all bearing,
where the meaning of this
mountain to ascend.

for all your words
they have left you here,
the world that love forgot
in this some bizarre dream
that you can never leave,
some negative coma
you can never shake.

-S.C. Martinez

what happened here–
power lines drift, drift,
mark yardage in the ocean
where no one can see.

the world has ceased to turn
and all things are
as they are,
as they’ve always been.
so far out to touch,
bordering on abstract,
we drift, drift
out into the ocean.

things crawl out of the night,
through the fabric of thought
like portals to some other place,
tearing as they go
the world from out our hands
and out our hearts.

they come in dreams and fail,
gone before the light of day
and who owns the secret
calls to witness only himself
to stand in judgment
of all the earth,
no greater entity having cause
to exist among such frail
and ignorant things.

-S.C. Martinez

like moths aflame within,
some terrible reflection of their burning selves
draws them to the light,
a false mirror,
an empty gesture,
a memory genetic in prose
of some greater time when such transgression
was noble and with purpose,
all things of dead rhetoric
as they bounce off the glass.

like lions consumed by their own,
the irony of such things not lost
in their fading vessels,
their spilled viscera,
their spoiled eyes
soon no stars nor suns shall occupy,
inglorious the method to their tragedy,
these kings deposed by a nameless law
no beast can escape.

like men lacking witness
to their own becomings,
no ledger to recall this moment from any other,
without mothers or fathers,
born of the earth itself
they come issuing forth from caves
and rivers and graveyards,
empty of the mind and the heart
they can never become
without the barest of memory to scrape from,
all forms alike in their end,
all things the same throughout.

-S.C. Martinez

bastard children god left behind,
i’ve seen you lumber in the dark
far away and safe from their law,
i’ve watched you drag your quarry
across the blacktop rivers that stretch
across the face of the earth.

footprints replaced with thread tracks,
i’ve heard you catcall in the night,
the shrill laughter of debauchery,
the marble pattern in your eye,
misplaced by the absence of holding hands
left to wander the streets alone.

and with the darkest of hearts,
i’ve watched you barrel down on the weak,
the poor, the pockmarked, the skinless,
between your crosshairs they fit so well,
i’ve smelled the fast decay of their being
carried through the midnight air.

i played my part as i passed along,
warning the child to move on,
but you aimed your headlights dead center
and broke his spine like a promise,
i watched him tremble in the dark,
i watched him shiver in the night,
i watched him die as i heard you laughing.

i know what you’ve done
and i know just as he knows
of the monster that hides beneath the skin
and inside the heart of such things,
in the shadows lurks a beast composed of static,
and i have seen you in the dark,
i’ve seen you in the night.

-S.C. Martinez

the yellow slant of morning light
spills through the fold, filtered
and off-color, a strange rhythm
to the day, dreams of shifting faces
and backward logic a precursor to
what will come to pass in the world
of the living, what has long been known
to the keepers of the other.

so much depravity,
it’s hard to know how i feel of it all.
i will never die, i will live forever
among the stark contrasts of will and purpose,
person and spirit, man and monster,
hidden from the sun yet naked before the moon,
howling some primitive lament,
upward that pale face of indifference.

comfort now the enemy, comfort the sacrifice,
with or without logic, comfort must fail,
the tragedy of it all is somehow still amusing.

-S.C. Martinez