I'm Matt.

I once lived in the land of the blind, inside a house on a ridge up the canyon aside the valley over those hills by the sea. Now, barefoot and hatless, I haunt the land of cannibals and green borders.

I have briefly held several professions in my short life. I have tilled poor clay; raked thin, dusty dirt. Yet I am a pretentious peasant. I have come out of the Wasteland to kneel in rich soil, churned by mountains of ice, and resume my longest held and steadiest occupation: To lie with sincerity. It is a noble endeavor, here on this plain of deep earth, and I hope to continue with it for many years.

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NOTES.

The wise man chants of mysteries, and love and death, and the ends to which we belong.

Gather round, my sleepy children, but speak not

of what you will, here, return to this following day.

We each have our reasons for silence

Let us fear and praise the silence.

Waste not your steamy breath

on blissful deaf constellations

or blind sullen embers

Nor will any assembled here

pass on so much of your wisdom to the worms

as to leave even a hint of bitter taste in their churning mouths.

So confident in their own salvation,

they refuse our insights.

Only physical sustenance do they desire

from our flesh.

Foolish, ignorant, arrogant, damned?

Would that we, in our guts,

could digest aeons of experience?

What would the chicken say to us, as we rent her flesh,

of bugs and mud and straw?

What insight the apple finds

most important to mention,

before we consume it entire?

Would we be able to hear the theories of our ancestors,

splintered jaws gnashing

beneath the mounds of earth?

Such wealth Sawney Bean would have to share!

Be satisfied with the silence

and sleep lightly.

Your worms are waiting.

The Children Respond

Bury me not with the heartless worms!

Throw me into the sea!

The fish will appreciate a meager meal!

My bones sleep in the dark.

An attempt at an explanation

Speak simply, perhaps elegantly, about kings

sequestered in mossy places long years past,

eventually rotted heaps,

apparitions passing silently.

Regardless

Why

does a

diamond

resemble

a circle

more than

a square does?

Grade schooler's story

Yesterday I went to the park. There is a pond there with ducks and a single goose. I wonder of the goose is lonely—probably not. He probably thinks he is a duck. I hope he is not lonely, I hope that dogs and cats are not lonely. Some of the ducks follow him. Yesterday a few followed him for a little while. But the goose kept going and the ducks stopped following. The goose kept going, and he walked into the street and got hit by a car. He was a goose not a human so as for what he was trying to do, your guess is as good as mine. Actually I know what he was trying to do. It was sad and noble and as right of an action as you can make in a wrong world. But I made it up. The goose didn't go into traffic, he just walked around the pond and honked.

I like the reflection of light on dirt. It's a good kind of light. Even evening light, or especially evening light or afternoon light or morning light or noon light. Light on dirt is good. You can tell a lot about the day.

Cold

I want to be a man who does things in the cold. A winter man. A man who builds fortresses int the ice. Who brings domes of glass and bronze to frozen wastes. Inside them, fields of green and arbors of blue and gold. It will be me who brought the inside in from the outside.

People will avoid the doors, where it is still cold. When I come through the doors I will melt. When I go out through the doors the wind will hit me like a great weight, or it will be still, like a crystalline parasite, and suck out my warmth.

It will be bright or grey or dim, but never dark. When I walk away from that cavern they live in, that I made with my hands and body, I will dream of no lights and no power and frightened breaths fogging panes from the inside, shrapnel ice gnawing panes from the outside. It will be me and the stars and shadowed horizon.

Then I will return to their home to once more chip away at the audacious ice. I will be a man of the cold. I will smile when I see their warmth.

This is what swords will do

1: The lost prince stumbles over the earth.

2: If you talk about dreams I'll kill you. Well not kill you but I'll be rather upset for a little while. Piqued.

3: Though it is clear that words, once said, cannot be taken back, it's rather unnerving that now the same applies to thoughts. Only very rarely have I wished to take back words, and then always to put different ones in their place.

1: A prince running from a queen, for a queen.

2: Ha. Swift, unconscionable act.

3: I learn when the hand rests gently with dignity.

1: No, maybe. The hardest promises to keep are the ones where you break it gradually because it is not done or undone but made and it's not even really broken until it's too late.

2: I would write but now is the time for sleep. Agh sleep sleep dreams drive them to their proper place. No dreams of such cacophony.

3: But dreams of fields and small green lounging hillsides and trees and orchards and going where one wants and best of all being where one wants best of all having where what one wants be. Write it now.

1: The Queen wasn't a queen and the Prince wanted to be a King.

2: And so I do.

Burned child fears the fire?

A red sun today and a full yellow-gray moon. I saw them both.

Lights out!

If there are any here who

do not know fear,

follow me.

The door begins to speak

Praise be!

To all!

Your Cavortations!

And Revelries!

You wrap yourself in glowing collars

After the fact I imagine caustic regards

The moon is less yellow tonight

And that little bit less full

I would wrap myself in symbols

that do the opposite of glow

To make the rest of me

seem more bright in comparison

Your music making would do well

to take some lessons

from the sounds of the frogs.

Birthday (Really!)

Do you think the rain is for you? No. The earth weeps for me. This sky's joyfully shed tears are mine. The cool air takes the heat from my face, but I give it up willingly. It is a most lawful transaction. This day's moist tearstreaks are a mask for me—a clear mask, like glass used to see with clarity the pitiful detail of things near and far—It is a mask for me to see out of and revel, but also a mask for others to see through and into me, for underneath its crystal surface I shall be a stone bird statue, severe and joyous.

Unfinished

A bit of dust plays amidst and through the beams.

Look out to the river, the forests, the hills, the plain.

Breath deep

The morning-warm air is mellowed by the cool moisture of the earth

---dewy grass, leaf, and needle

bespeak the recent laughter of sky half blue, half white

clouds pat-patting upon the ground

The horizon is close

You are closer

Quizzical

--Where are you going?

--Wherever the dim glow of madness drives me.

--You're an irresponsible being?

--No. I'm just responsible to different forces.

Muse

I just followed that crescent sliver moon

till the false glowing strands of civilization took over

and I wandered towards the glare b'neath my eyelids.

Apostate corners of my brain

for once hummed content

And I paused beneath a would be spire

...and continued on my journey

Less reckless

than e'er I've been before.

Fools judge and are judged differently than other men.

The outside. From this is where I draw my strength. I must also learn to draw strength from the inside of things.

Admonishments wielded closely

The partial man,

the man with no hands, was told

“You are no man, you are

boy”

So he climbed up that hill and

when he rolled down for real,

he was whole, and

a man.

The Room with a surprisingly decent location

Out there

Old copper sheds its beautiful corrosion

and is turned to brass and bronze

under the chill breathed bellows of

the generous baker in the sky.

So long the kiln fires glint

I am soothed markably.

Fearless fly

consume my shoes

You have my blessing

I'm so goddamn full of love and compassion.

You are light in strange places

--Do you listen to the music of humanity's adulthood

taking root?

It's like snow gone gentle.

Like meteors,

glowing insects on eyes and face.

--The wind sometimes blows in a melodious way

through the windows

of the dead man's home where I live.

Does that count?

--Begone,

unfelt civilization!

Give me only light and rain!

So be it. We have squandered that precious resource known as truth and in its place inserted folly. History rewritten.

“He was so good that even when he didn't know what he was doing,

he was better than everyone else.”

Forget the things that threaten our sanity--

Sweet memory was designed to bear itself away,

lifted aloft from the soft dusty silt of recollection.

Pencil and paper is a terrible thing.

I want to throw things off tables, and overturn them

He should have gotten the murdering knife

A hook is a useful thing in the forest.

Prove culture is superior to technology?

In the version I know, John Henry loses!

In the history I believe,

Siberian wolves were dociles;

Light feet leave little notice upon the snow.

Prey and predator alike

Provide our raiment,

For humans are the fiercer.

Amidst general dimness (during music)

I begin to watch

The silver crests of this

steaming world's blue brilliant grandchildren.

Sitting is an admission of guild

Standing is an admission of deceit

To lie is to regret and to hope

I yet know not what walking is

Maybe it's humanity.

Aesop

“Silly birds,” spoke Cat, “Where will you fly to now?

You are trapped, you were trapped,

when you came into this House.”

“We are not, we care not,” said the birds,

and they boldly stood their ground.

Cat's smile rumbled hunger, and his clawtips

danced upon the floor.

“I will rake you, I will eat you, your carelessness did you in,

like foolish, foolish Icarus, who flew too high upon the wind.”

The birds' eyes stopped flitting, and their wingtips settled low.

Staring forward, never blinking, they spoke together to the beast,

“Need we remind you, signore? the sun did not kill Icarus,

did not stop his breath.

The ocean did,

the ocean did.”

And their beaks tore

apart Cat's flesh.

Hoc Feci

It had to break;
Everything about it

was designed to sunder, split, splinter.

And when the time came

for it to fulfill its duty and be torn askew,

it twisted and clamored and groaned

and grew white and grey at the edges

and with a final, desolate, rending sound,

it violated centuries of design and breeding and purpose and order

and took a path its ancestors had never attempted

and its stunned designers had never expected:

It did not break."

The Regent's Prayer

Let there be no ground that will not feel,

before the castigation of winter's first solemn frost,

the naked footprints of messengers who deliver

this stern-marrowed truth:

My nephew the Prince

thirteen year old son

of my brother the-king-dead-14-years-past

has seen the future, and he says

We will all be courageous someday.

The Adjutant's Advice

No stars for you

only pointless rock fences

and blood in your ears

and a moon that seems too far away

to give you any help worth having

I can see they've burned the charitability

out of your flesh

Some fools who thought they could make

their world more real

by filling the sky with mortal smoke

as if the cold was some beast

you could hold at bay

by pretending you can't see it

and it can't see you

No, they won't be expecting your grim countenance

beneath their evening's ink soaked parchment

Find that grey-grit wasting wall

let the stones take your warmth

they'll gift thee clarity in exchange

You'll not need to thank them

You've other marks now

that demand the gratitude

born of a night with no stars

The Fisher Recollects

We saw such a man,

gaze seeking grey and blue-grey.

Hapless he stood upon the sand wall--

it only pretends to break the wind.

Behind, shatter mouthed children gamely oblige its sick, weary, pride.

They crouch amidst the twirling sawgrass,

wetness caressing the salty crevices of their faces.

Their arms, smeared to the elbows in gulls' blood,

embrace delicate shoulders.

He payed their presence no heed,

showing only intent for crawling amongst the speckled crabs

and crushing their little bodies.

At last he spoke

"The ocean waits to be drunk

and drink in turn

I quell their hopes to breath

and so keep that roiling surface

beneath my own mouth"

and here he dropped to a whisper,

"hesitant."

With this he departed us

down the shore and out of sight

never deviating

as the tide turned leaps and somersaults

over and under his ankles

and the children eyed the crabs.

Swollen knuckles--bloodied gums

Let us fetch the bamboo stakes

Tear them from their stasis amidst mud and leaves

Sharpen their ends to wavering tunes

Harden their points in the smoldering, carcass fire

Wield them as an ashen-tipped phalanx of destruction

Against all enemies of valor and justice

And when the shafts break

Brandish them twain unto splinters

Then we shall fight with fist and tooth

And be purified, necks craned to heaven.

Let it not be said we did not try

To capture the spirit of moonlit clouds

Rippling above the far darkened plain.