DOA in May

Public Domain, The Science of Life and Death in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

           Disconnect on arrival

to rights, be damned and dreaming

of erosion, cobbled together seconds

in fractured and illicit fields

of vision, you lie

in the pooled insurgent

crust of well-worn auspices

            Bleeding off, drawing down in

moments encryption,

flashing in pitch and fragmented

vision laid forth in infinite halves

of depth and of death

in breeding haze dimmed

and fading last rites

            Waking fucked-off and parched

in suspended animation bled

and crawl to whet the throat,

fixed in searing lines

all the way through this beaming

deliverance path of makeshift

and grave – you wait

            Informed in catatonic states

of chronic mass, absorbed through

surreally exposed grafts

coming down from wallowed

hallowed eulogies, gifted in tithes

rushing into the bloodstream

informing its finality

Matt Mauldin
5/2017
Santa Barbara, CA

Appears in Patterns of Reconciliation

Status Interruptus

The body resets during sleep,

muscle memory abounds through fitful coughs,

aching joints, dry-itching skin,

serving notice to Mind at Rest

Rogue satellites broadcast status

interruptus in the arc of their course

through night-stills of twittering chirps,

drones of machine fan humming,

chorus of death-chant crows

Restful bodies lie in solace and silence

cleaning filters, expunging

the need for the minds’ input

of the day’s disorders,

its tightening grip as evidenced

unwelcome in the clutch of my wrists

urgently held in my plaintive palms

reacting to the distorted playback

of looped invasive dreams

In halves unfold time loops,

in and out the quirks and fits,

unwilling and unable to fall gracefully

into the limited and limitless embrace

of total surrender to the mercy of the alarm

residing in a small compact computerized appendage

that greets and accompanies,

that fixes the cycle

Matt Mauldin
5/2017
Santa Barbara, CA

Appears in Patterns of Reconciliation

The Spirit Vacuum

Grail Maiden: Public Domain Image by Arthur Rackham

Exploitive conceptualization spurned the many,

and molded clay crystallized

one’s internalized role in obscuring truth

into illuminations on one’s existence

Borne witness to

blood on the altar, in rapture

subject to confirmation bias

Remember when we wondered astray?

From stately sanctuaries, ominously hanging crosses

symmetrical in third dimensions,

past the rooms where we avoided Sunday School,

and fellowship hall with checkered tile floors,

dodging old men in suits while displaying

fundamental forms of delinquency, foreshadowing

re-examinations and unwelcome assertions

Senses of obligation and duty, under development

disrupted – remained unengaged,

yet instinctually ingrained with rusted-out relics,

unfulfilled yet colored through the prism

of their projected worldview,

into the spirit vacuum,

born of isolation, inoculation, or indoctrination

Enlightenment grew to be formless and prescient –  beyond

its call and spurning commonly identifiable text,

unmotivated and unmoved, redefined

into chasms revealed beyond comfort or convenience

A trace beyond deliberate, unveiling like nature

reclaiming its basis over severing generations

in guided engagement,

offering virtual telepathy unwarranted,

revealing ranges of emotion in sound

unparalleled within the depths of its grooves,

coming to refine this presence without attempting to corral an origin

Matt Mauldin
5/2017
Santa Barbara, CA

Appears in Patterns of Reconciliation

Discussions with Divergent Spirit Guide

Dreaming, disconnected from the spate of paralyzing

streams, static painted in morning cool mist, numbing

this prayer, this visceral conversation, with Divergent Spirit

Guide

I asked of thee, in fleeting reverence of slipping sands,

to justify this play for divine affection, a blessing of existence,

fleeting days aligning moments fracturing, fashioned out

of trepidation for passing lineage

This is an exercise, in its way an unfathomed form reaching out,

not unlike some lost shadowy figure thought unmovable

Hands, words, extended in cloying sentiment, reach repelled

by desperation gaze

Each side wanting to believe the equation’s integrity

My partition’s path laid out over many years, painful deliverances

of hollow triumphs, bitter cynicism segued into warmth and flow

of unmistakable gratitude, seen and raised and slowly laid down

to rest in memory’s grave

Denial and defiance railed and scrawled in regrettable volume,

exhibitions in deferred distraction and expressions in servitude, masking

the color of skyward eyes, into feigned affection for that which we share

interest, an increasingly fallow world

Sequences emerged from missing, tight air spaces, adjoined, evening out

retractions mistaken for truth and monuments running tactical

diversions, ironing out the creases of hysterical waking moments

waged from fevered dreams.

Hands alight in the symbolic bewilderment of belief, in solemn

questioning form

Oh, Hallowed Ground, I’ve walked, carefully treaded and spread

rigid snap-brush and clay, covering sacred imprints in the soil,

away from your name, indefinitely surpassed and encircled, brightened

in the holy light of decay

In the spotlight of significance, in pockmarked ritual surveillance,

in knowing acknowledgement and unknowing disembowelment,

in the unveiling of the customized context of your face and name,

I remain humbly detached and gainfully engaged

To the fluidity of text and dampening tone of voice in differing octaves, offering

conciliatory terms of re-engagement and remission, pathways

into the vein’s circulatory regulation of sinful pittance, carefully conveyed,

repurposed denial and compelling in its spite

What is implanted can no longer be connected to logic

or interpreted conclusions

Offer no logical outcome or connection to ancient parallel streams,

other than vessel carrying flow brought forward in open divinity

No remedial rewards for one’s constricted, tethered scope –

there are no shutters slung to slot the blotting light streams

Offer no solemn assurance, gazed upon tapestry,

averse to shades fatigued and enthralled in dot dashed formation fails

None collected in withered wisdom, or fronts discerned by elder committees

in the face of blunted wits, to mimic far slung eyes toward id and era forsaken

Offer reconciliation not with the sky, drifted and blue, far away comfort dripping,

chirping in dementia’s rhythm, unseen yet engaged within mercurial leanings,

sans salvation permit, withstood through feasibility study and minutes,

bidding commissioned and surveyed, swaying blades of grass leaning eternally

Offer none but the rain awash, obscured gravelly drift extension, reconciliation

within the scope of newly budding green, ensconced amid mournfully dissolving escarpments

None but salience, dispersed unwittingly in regeneration’s scion bared

ungrafted in mortal soil, tended and raised in fertile detail, recirculating elements,

fostering new orbits

Matt Mauldin
5/2017
Santa Barbara, CA

Appears in Patterns of Reconciliation

Modern Weekend Confessional

Public Domain, English Library

Put your hands over your ears

or fingers gingerly plugging holes

Anthill to anthill, disruption fanning,

and you’re left smarting as pin-prickly stings

slosh around all over your body

grating and berating the frayed ends of severed nerves

Trolling the internet at ultra-premium high speeds

in search of the latest ensuing disaster,

human beings in peril at home and death abroad –

poverty… atrocity… injustice… genocide

extinction… acidification… bleaching… deforestation…

glaciers melting,

corruption and erasing the largely false ideals

we somehow kept as possibility of working out, over our lifetimes

Conflicted with the slow march of progress

like lines on a graph, intersecting at some crucial nexus

How to reconcile its passing?

Just a small place and a small piece

searching for existential definition, defining roles

How to resolve the time in this place?

Charged with the collection and convergence of

several disparate humans, each at different points

in their personal dynamic and stages of reincarnation,

juggling moods and well-being

Sometimes I shut myself down as a means of self-defense

The world becomes so insular at these stages

I’m surrounded by chaparral-covered mountains

and a vast ocean, up and over valleys with springtime mustard

and poppy blooms along vast green meadows that crawl

up the sides of mountains, peppered with lone pines

that cry a lonesome song or sing in budding and latent liberation,

depending on the mood

But it reads as four walls

I struggle to reconcile that beauty

laid before me by some version of a god

in the flesh, metaphysical, within the specter of the soul,

imagined, or only existing as some random chain of atoms

I marvel at the manifestation of human emotion

laid out over millennia as modes of expression

left behind and laid bare, to the vast and expanding hordes

in search of the next beauty

I marvel at the march of science and medicine, and humanity’s

wide-eyed wonder when it advances an interest,

coupled with a disdain for truth and process

when warning of excess, continually marching

back to old comforts of mutually assured self-destruction

and consolidation of power, around currency

On an individual level, we will stop traffic

to ensure the safety of a family of geese crossing the street,

while rezoning our land to destroy their habitat,

purchasing poisons for their waters,

and consuming commodities borne of their clear-cut forests

Some version of god shakes their holy head

I drift back into some form of mediation with the cohabitants

I care for, and they for me

Indulging in some fleeting excess making

for a passable journey through this insular place

in a modern world, shaping itself

as an outlet for someone else’s strange desolation

waiting to venture out and see what else remains

in somewhere else’s juncture

Matt Mauldin
5/2017
Santa Barbara, CA

Religion Among Us

The religious among us know that the planet is a slow-draining tub with tiny black mildew-

stained holes in the sealing caulk

They know that stagnant water cannot stand,

its seepage drains through until gravity takes hold and shapes its course correction all the way down to the bottom of the floorboards

Opening in idiosyncratic waves through daylight hours in advance of sycophantic displays

            escaping scrutiny, they call it for what it is

They recognize that master carpentry and architectural drafting are among the noblest

professions, yet are defined within their bountiful constraints

The religious among us sense a third dimension in translucent casting and enlightened stanzas,

            viewing them as transcendent while sensing their nascent decline and disturbance

Possessing a belief not in what can be possessed,

            but in the riches of the transitory and the fulfillment of transference

They forge ahead in stoic grace, making good on internal resolve to procure modeled states of

being, while improving the deterioration and desecration happening around them,

warming grave hearts in fellowship along thin air space between laughter and tears

MM 3/17

American Street

Summer’s writhing beauty,

grieving in isolation’s stain, paved over –

bountied thickets, turned earth,

fallowed fields

Pillars of stray sticks and clay

paths to the top. Unfettered in their view

of imagined decades

Bloody battles laid bare in pages

of the World Book

Statistics of the dead –

gruesome and grotesque,

bravely reenacted by boys on the street

Supply runs,

the exchange in Doraville – ‘Old Sarge’

Replica, semi-automatic, battery-operated M-16

charged soundscapes, flanked

in the woods behind our houses

Bunkered in camouflage gear,

with face paint sticks,

and hot water canteens

Go-cart trails across the street,

written in the trees,

too afraid to ride or drive, I’d watch

At the edge of a long backyard,

a creek dammed in piles dug out,

erosion of its banks,

attracting mosquitos, and the ire

of grandmothers

The street we’d roam,

packing Daisy pellet guns. Distressing friends

shooting at squirrels on power lines

Kicking fences of angry yard dogs

Spying and profiling,

across and between a ditch and some yards,

our tormented neighbor, brandishing,

and his idle threats

My older cousins played stickball

over Miller Lite in the backyard

of their bachelor house

Wiffle balls wrapped

in black electric tape

Thrown heat, it would welt your skin

if pegged, your bare hands if caught,

off a wicked yellow plastic bat

A trove of dirty magazines in their front

bathroom closet, not

just Playboy or Penthouse,

they had Genesis, Gallery and Oui

Taking one from the bottom of the pile

in my waist band, I’d sneak past

them and their friends, drinking

and talking about the lines on games,

calling their bookies

We traded baseball cards out of plastic sheets,

re-visioning series’ in the yard,

reimagining each future and past

season of major American team sports,

but not hockey or soccer

Night games of Capture the Flag,

epic in the darkness

with only one light on the street – pitch black all around

Explorations of the spring, the destination

of the neighborhood creek

A live crawdad was swallowed whole

on part of the journey

I blazed a trail, bionic speed,

over rumors of wild dogs,

all the way home

Summer’s blissful abandon,

rezoned for posterity,

its development passed

in memoriam

MM 3/17

Spring Solution

As it were, the last memory,

wafting across blooming countryside shelter,

from spring’s whipping Mistral

Time’s effortless pass left us stranded

on vistas, vines untethered, atop cobbled soils

Grand meandering currents to the west,

and mighty glaciered peaks of the east

Offroading in a French rental car –

risking damage and stern consternation,

for the sake of blathering discourse

on the significance of a slope

Fascinations defining all composition,

and the storied evolution of dirt

Origins upstream,

from steel and iron

locks, setting the flow adrift,

splitting currents from adjoined waters

Passersby waving away, unbowed

A culminated city overlooked

by ominous clouds and gothic brows,

through colors from an age of enlightenment

From coliseum slopes of granitic density,

terraced erosion, too steep to tread

out the bitter blood and iron

from its sweet fruits

From ancient stone crosses,

monastic rhythms over centuries,

laid in pastoral patterns,

on gentle grades, gleaning redemption

and a kiss of sublime, resting

in an unkindly giving moment

To pastel brick-stone street cafes,

amid bustling city markets, oblivious

to monuments of purposeful past

Retreats of forgiveness

in shining fields of lavender, stone outcroppings

overlooking the vast indifferent sea,

or the enveloping meadows

harbored from crumbling ruins

of solemn futures

MM 3/17