Tag: tyspoems

“To Burn Words”

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Tyler R. Martin

The cool thing about paper is that it burns,
It’s amusing to watch it fade and dissolve
In the crisp crackle of the flame.
Words, however, do not burn,
There’s nothing to char, nothing to
Dissolve in the air.
There’s really not much to them,
No physical matter, anyway,
Yet they linger, like ghosts,
Remaining angered in the ether.
Paper burns,
The words on paper burn.
All evidence of their
Existence floats innocently in the heavens
And no harm had been done.
But words, once spoke
Remain nonflammable
And best you can expect is forgiveness
And the ability to cope
With a dour relationship.

“Calculations”

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Tyler R. Martin

You piss a few times a day,
Each smoke takes about five minutes,
Eight hours a day, five days a week,
You toil to pay your mortgage.
About an hour a day
On the freeway.
TV commercials eat up
At least two.
Seven hours out of every twenty four
You’re sleeping, if you’re lucky.
On good days, about forty five minutes
Of your girl bitching at you.
About a year total
Sick in bed,
Double that for hangovers.
Double that one for days of complete misery.
About a month a year changing diapers,
Then that time’s spent bitching
At your kids when they grow up.
Three years total waiting in doctors offices,
Five years waiting on lines:
Grocery stores, fast food, football games.
At least five minutes a day
Drinking tap water.
Then, once you’ve survived all that,
Heart attack
And you’re dead for eternity

“Rubberneck”

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Tyler R. Martin

When I was a kid
I made plastic fly traps
Out of empty soda bottles.
My uncle showed me how
To cut a small tapered hole
In the side, and fill the bottle
With chunks of meat and water.
The meat rots, stinks, drawing
Hungry flies who come to eat
And meet their bitter end,
Drowning in the water.
The meat works well
To draw them in, but the rotten
Flies, trapped earlier in the summer,
Work even better. They rot
And stink and draw exponentially
More hungry flies to fulfill their
Cannibalistic urges. Despite
The irony of feeding off
The misery of your peers
Only to succumb to the same fate,
And in turn be fed upon yourself,
The hungry flies swarmed the trap.
As more died, the stink grew
And more were drawn.
This is what clouded my mind
As I sat in a meandering river
Of traffic on a highway which stunk
Of death as commuters rotted away their lives
Slowing down to watch an ambulance
Loading a dead body into it’s back,
And to stare dumbly at a
Tow truck dragging away
A battered, bloody minivan…..

“weirdness”

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Tyler R. Martin

Some kind of madness fell on me tonight,
Everything was strange,
Music sounded strange,
Fucking felt strange,
Food tasted strange,
Cigarettes burned unevenly,
Booze felt thick on my tongue.
There was a sense of perpetual queasiness,
Way down deep in my stomach
To the point where no amount of vomiting
Could even scratch the surface of the issue.
I felt dense, heavy and airy at the same time.
I had a vat of molten liquid lead cooling in my core
And arms and legs were now endowed with
A buoyancy comparable to helium balloons.
I burned and froze
Sweated and shivered
Quaked in my chair
Grounded and Zen.
I felt ill and powerful
Grey red and green
While simultaneously
Realizing my beer was empty…
I got up, grabbed another beer.