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

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

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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

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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