'Michael Martinez'

Biography

I have been writing since childhood. Born in London and interested in various forms of free verse poetry. I have published three short collections - ‘Coventry, Spain: Poems for a Darkening Age’ (2016/18), ‘Mesopotamia: The evolution of movement and the evils of water’ (2020), and ‘Tales of an Anarchist Pigeon & Stories of Hatless Meandering Souls’ (2022). My poems concern, amongst other things, identity, migration and memory. My books are available but contact me on my email above. I hope to post more samples here soon.

The House of Wax (published in collection Mesopotamia)

The House of Wax he struck at Vincent Price’s face the murderous villain but the face cracked being made of wax revealing his burnt flesh the sins of past murders as i recoiled and hid behind the sofa scared of the television the man with the broken face the broken pretence of his power as my mother’s hand caressed my head my eyes closed beneath me the cheap carpet man-made plastic pubic fibres staring up at me etching winding sea-like patterns into my frightened emerging mind of fake Persian designs as if maps of lost worlds Michael Martinez 2020

Pyrenees 1939

The Pyrenees 1939 Mortal men stumbling into unknown spaces removing their bloodied coats, with the dried mudded backs from resting under the rain. Spoken to in a foreign language as they empty their pockets and the torn sacks made of rope. Letters from their homes, empty wet leather wallets, pictures of visited places and small books of rules. The emptied pockets turned inside out like magic tricks revealing clumps of paper torn magazine cuttings of women and castles afar: fiefdoms of personal intrigue. Trinkets thrown into boxes to be burned without recording, the ashes emptied then blown into the air winding into the unknown. Michael Martinez 2019 mmloctober@gmail.com

These Fallen People

I live with these fallen people in this shaded land, their conquests lost within their broken dreams, as I queue for bread and beer: this world of fear and dust entering my lungs leaving me lost in time looking at their stained hands. Michael Martinez 2020

Leaving Employment (another incomplete draft)

When I leave I will not remake or make The plinth of stone of grey clay Upon which my story books Pile up in a metallic manner A monument to pretentious intellect Pronouncing heroic tales of ‘innovation’ - The development of meaning The sword of progress - Cited by parsimonious selves Reciprocating citations Eternal embellishment I will scuttle as that anti-Semite would say Sidewards A weary crab leaving the ebb and flow Of waves and debris That changes shape accordingly With no sense of purpose Then under some pile of rocks Gather myself in the shade Await the lobster catcher’s cage But I will tell stories quietly to myself Of that world with a multitude of rooms And parallel lives we may have led Rooms with different shades and colours With women in brightly coloured dresses Some with blue eyes and black curly hair Some with eyes that cannot see Yet stare directly into your heart And ignore your sins but share your pain Then another room with my dead friend Talking to me about Joker Man The lyrics 'unclear and uncertain' Knowing he would die but hoping Liverpool would win the Premier League Then another room with twin girls Daughters of the female oracle Who I never saw and never were Who could have been and seen My piles of endless words About industrial relations and strikes There in that shaded wet place I will sit quietly and gently The sun slowly sinking Casting a bright blanket Over the drying sand with its small black stones Lacing the shoreline like small tombs Toppled gently and left to rest As monuments of somethings that happened once Michael Martinez 2020

Tales of an Anarchist Pigeon

sitting on some rusty purposeless wire looking down the platforms of Paddington’s Circle Line the rain falling gently and settling on the head of a sad man who walks in circles on the platform as if a bird looking for stale bread almost like we do minute after bleeding minute unless it’s shagging or building our nests in some dying tree or leaf and moss filled gutter having once circled with our drooping wings promising food to the ones we lust after on this rainy autumn evening the rushing and hectic people avoid our shit landing on their heads that can drool down their hairy chests or fading breasts held up by some latex or implants these so-called masters of the universe who burn our homes then torture our brethren as they layer the earth with some grey mucus that hardens then cracks then crumbles these bloody losers who turn our trees of rest into dust or toxic leafless and pointless objects yet this meandering hatless and sad soul the one circling around below pointlessly on the edge of the platform as if understanding this mess or knowing that something is not quite right looks up at me as if pondering about my short life noticing my burnt and virtually absent pigeon feet looking up as if expecting me to fly away with the shape and pattern of my flight conveying some deep meaning some connection to better times when he had love and I had my feet Michael Martinez 2019 mmloctober@gmail.com

When I think I know you can see me

So I am imagined - as Angel González said - being reflected Inside your brain cells. A circuit of fibres that sees me standing ‘within’ your thinking: briefly flickering. Momentarily there inside you like some son waiting to be born and floating oblivious. Warmed by your heart perhaps lighting up the deep sea fishing nets which is the mind. Electrical discharges between rows of thoughts jostling against fantasies: fleeting and unseen floating like an unborn child. (Michael Martinez 2021)

Ride with me amigo

Ride with me my last known friend and leave the directory behind, no need to remember the numbers. Just saddle up and buy us two sombreros. The sun will burn hard, scorching persistent memories: leaving us to it’s unrelenting mercies. Into a desert together meandering aimlessly we will ride, whistling tunes from the Saturday morning pictures we saw at the cinema when we were boys and looked at the arrows and gunshots skirting past the rocks after the men visited the saloons where powdered women shone from their lipstick as their tassels waved above the fishnets. You and me alone (wistful) in the desert storms oblivious to where we wander, leaving the high roads we could not see and the alleys beckoning to our youth. Just pack some bottles of whatever so we can maybe hide again. Michael Martinez 2021

Waiting Rooms

Waiting rooms, needles in the bin, all quietly contemplating. Waiting rooms with pictures: bullet points and ticks and crosses. Places to remake dark futures, by turning them into new ‘projects’. Maybe one more year living without fear thinking of something else, crafting new prospects. Remaking the soul in a clay oven having been thrown on the pottery wheel changing my form hoping to relearn, again. (Michael Martínez,2021)

In the beginning there was the word

Poem at the edge of the page above the last word balanced indented precariously f a l tering teetering as words about to co ll a p se into the abyss that is the W o r d as it was In the beginning o r the end of the line (Michael Martinez, 2022)

What’s left of me?

What’s left of me? When I die? Or when I’ve forgotten what to do with my time? A form of death of the heart and other appendages. What’s left of me? Not politically but physically, personally, philosophically? And what are these meandering shadows on the tiled floors with their simple patterns of leaves? Who are these younger moneyed types that are walking by and ignoring me as if I’m mister invisible, a ghost of Christmas future or past or whatever? So my unfinished black coffee on the table is left behind with the stains drying on the surface into meaningless shapes signifying sloppiness - fragmented patterns to be washed away when I’m gone by unforgiving, undervalued and underpaid hands. (Michael Martinez 2022)

Cars in the distance

Cars in the distance I can hear the humming of the road whilst sitting in the conference building upstairs alone next to their old library the window of the hallway open. So I can hear within this stillness the rolling wheels of proper people heading home as they generate a slow steady murmuring like a sea wave not turning back losing the script of its story so this is what I hear steadily coming through the window invisibly but purposefully, perhaps, moving my memory back to the past where I often rested on a bed holding novels of angst and anxiety in an apartment without furniture near a highway that ceaselessly meandered on, humming too with the pitch constant and me thinking of where I would be, what I would be, with who I would be and why: the sound like a sea that sinks us back to the beginning where things crawled out of it onto some pristine shore with clean stones on the sand - some place without bigger fish to chase you to your salty end. A sea that never turns back, never recedes but pulls you back instead into the greyness of your cells. M Martinez 2023

Solitary Notebooks

Solitary Notebooks I've not known you or heard you nor been close enough to hear you sing some somber lullaby to the strangers you speak of softly and suddenly, strangers that deceitfully stained your stockings and white lace dresses leaving through the back door of neon lit buildings with their cracked concrete walls. Yet I see some sense in the songs and symbolism of survival and sense making that sketch their way through your solitary notebooks reaching into the abandoned universes of our imagination. M Martinez 2024

Sounds of a Demonstration

Sounds of a demonstration The distant cacophony of loudhailers carried by the gentle wind into the green park it’s starlings scattered, searching diligently for bread bits fallen from the visitors’ tables and laps, with their coffee stains, onto the ground below as the sound of rhyming chants float through the air like soft drums on a stage miles away: recurring patterns unclear words and phrases of some distant land - perhaps? - and, is that, ‘children’ ‘broken by bombs’ in the lust for land it appears to say but the vocals change and the wind seems to float pushing the sound waves into the gentle trees that slowly bend and lean to the rhythms of mother nature - mother ?- making the tree branches meander - flags of green linen marking their space here in the stillness of a public park. Michael Martinez 2024

All poems are copyright of the originating author. Permission must be obtained before using or performing others' poems.

Blog entries by 'Michael Martinez'

Sounds of a Demonstration (31/05/2024)

Sounds of a Demonstration (31/05/2024)

Solitary Notebooks (14/04/2024)

The sea not still (11/03/2023)

What’s left of me? (27/03/2022)

Waiting Rooms (06/06/2021)

Ride with me amigo (25/04/2021)

When I think I know you can see me (06/03/2021)

Deliver me from this (23/02/2021)

Tales of an Anarchist Pigeon (28/12/2020)

Read more entries by 'Michael Martinez'…

Blog link: https://www.writeoutloud.net/blogs/michaelmartinez