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