Saturday, September 30, 2017

Steady Hand Guides


Take this bread it’s my body
Drink this wine it’s my blood
Extend a trembling hand snatched away,
stirring up dust in a darkened space
lying behind creaking doors
rotting off their hinges
Offered in intervals bounded in service,
like sponges soaking saturation,
seedlings nurtured turning earth,
or bile regurgitated in sickness
from seething parasite
Returns remain in question


Matt Mauldin
9/2017
Santa Barbara, CA

Stalking Seeds


Planted stalking seeds behind me
to watch years grow unfolding
in volumes, surrounding time
Subservient graces to upper reaches
in the arc of the shadow,
repelling light

Put miles on tread and between,
draining time from cold affronts
Awkward instruction quelling impulses,
tempering inspiration, bound
with laces of necessarily cruel choices
and judgement rendered

In living deliverance

Placated in rhymes finding
spaces to dwell the lines in validation
Redemptive finds pushing and pulling,
they drew distinct marks
met and fostered in quiet corners
shining on the surface

Journeys portended wedges
moving away from knowing places,
arising unknown or unrealized
A little surprised when expectations
held and gleaned in uncertainty
faded in the picture of years

In finite incompletion


Matt Mauldin
9/2017
Santa Barbara, CA

Saturday, September 23, 2017

Sons and Ghosts


How do you hold sands’ streaming
tiny irreverent beads?
Containment irrevocable- paths etched
casted out of idealized space
filled by sons and ghosts within
their movement- fractured bounds
of wayward conviction

Staring across the table
an abyss of expectations unfilled
steps taken in haste and backed off
in words not said nor met
in immediate formations
Their foundation laid in parallel
fragments defrayed

Borne of static spaces
lying between containment and engagement
and resting restless within arrangements
disjointed discomfort’s
hush falls over its scene
heads bowed in grace
clearing of the throat

Cut from the same genes
but not the same colorful spaces
they remain largely unexplored in sorts
like demilitarized zones
Staring now at depth and limitations
illuminated down into your numbered days
I see my own mortality


Matt Mauldin
9/2017
Santa Barbara, CA

Death Screens


Death screens laid out in visions
of moments alive from not-so-recent past
posted in emotive pensive recollections
tied together interpretations
terse or expansive but bounded
in a living breathing document

Fleeting as a moment’s breath
drawn in a chilling autumn morning
drawn closer immediacy beckoning
comments and concepts drawn
into the tapestry of a series of events
your eyes just can’t turn away from

Just leave this eulogy here
in a public record no one sees after
today without reminders
of the specks of lucent moisture
littered across the web in static
beacons giving rise to conscious states


Matt Mauldin
9/2017
Santa Barbara, CA

Monday, September 4, 2017

Placeholder


Placeholder
Desecration in progress – a monument
to which this moment is built, upon
rationalized existence in forfeiture
crushes onward
through manic headwinds without hope
without vision beyond the cusp

Vantages overseen in use
Spread aghast in projection, unresolved
reconciliation repelled and rewired
into intravenous tubes
dripping paths of new dawns breaking
alighted unbinding
invasive existence

Placeholder
The alter to which embowed
in askance the tradition arising gathering
its stake in the new dawn’s day
draining incremental moments
different shades of the same landscape
weathering its worn paths

Matt Mauldin
9/2017
Santa Barbara, CA