Wax Casting

Your voice pleading,
heaving on the other end of the line,
sucking up the air between
this episode and the tension you've razed

A tic away,
the disorder, books are strewn about the floor,
scissors in hand, inanimate objects lying
in defense of gravity

Everyone pleads,
their voices pitched across octaves and back,
with contingencies against what hope
remains lost

Cleaving the plot
into an idyll manor and scorching charred frame,
disparate parts seem unable to be made whole
in their defense

Scavenge in grasp,
we circle the pattern, elevating twisting symbols alight,
carelessly shifting away the calm of containment
into craft dysfunction

Gritting teeth through
the fallen hours on the other end of the line,
unable to signal motion ending
as if it never began

Matt Mauldin
10/2017
Santa Barbara, CA

First appearing in Event Horizon Magazine
https://eventhorizonmagazine.com/

Issue 3

Terminal

           The moon tonight

a small sliver of the sky, mournfully

mounting an end of the day’s

funeral song

            Whispered through wires

connecting radio speakers to God’s ears

humming below audible bounds

subterranean distraction drones

            Uncovering

recovering daylight hours shine,

their shadows lurching out of morning’s

disjointed colors through surreal filters

            Cold settling

congealed solid particles bonded grief

stabilized in solution, isolated impurities pull

through resolve’s uneasy impact

            Throes ingested

they magnify all hope swayed into favor,

bleak yet brimming in consciousness

terminal drift cum obligation

            Tidal decay

movement en masse measured in sediments’

malignant and parched encroachment

carved through archaic frozen fortresses

Matt Mauldin
10/2017
Santa Barbara, CA

Wavelengths

Our wavelengths

comingling,

jagged lines to frame

crucial axis

Points in cold fusion

divvied out

tension ‘cross intersecting minutes

Scattered foliage dissolves

wistful and crisp,

borne of shadows

Pale feedback loop

carving the course

we walk, divergent interests

conjoining

in some form - boilerplate

indifference

confined in the waning

spaces drawn off,

driven throughout

its dissolution

Sucking sounds,

drying finish

deadened in its hands,

in flesh arisen,

a ballast in regulation

of damnation’s determinate

flow, seepage muddled

in the surface

sinking aground

wrapped asphyxiation

Matt Mauldin
10/2017
Santa Barbara, CA

Birthmarks

This mortal assignment
drawn from images entrapped with time
lapses, like tin pan layers 
snapping back in blinding retreat
of a tape measure 

From distance a mind's eye 
only sees the black-lined quarter reaches
The edges of space determine
the depth to which the air can breathe -
it's happening in real time

The interest of reverence 
determines the full range this hollow bow
can chart fulfillment from
tacit understanding of the sacred ordained 
arrangement of order

Come forth from the space
craved and carved and created to covet
one's silken steely skin hardened,
lined with firm twine tension imprints,
binding the circulation

Blinding the movement of days
or the arrangements of isles owning
the differences, built out lifetimes
of knowing or not knowing how to fasten
a stake in opposing fields of wisdom

Matt Mauldin
10/2017
Santa Barbara, CA

First appearing in Event Horizon Magazine
https://eventhorizonmagazine.com/

Issue 3