Severed Expression

Seething severed ends
Exorcised through false havens
Exposed negatives

Blue Fade

Star-ridden blue fade
Beacons foreboding their weight
Livid in expression

Midway

I was born in the south in the year 1974,
six years after the death of Martin Luther King Jr,
ten years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
twenty years after Brown vs Board of Education

Growing up I remember witnessing the African-American marchers
through green-forested Forsyth County, GA
So many years a hostile and dangerous place for them from the lynchings of 1912
Greeted with epithets in the town of Cumming,
a gathering of white supremacists
from throughout the north of Georgia
spewing stones and hatred
across blighted generations

The same place where the Olympic torch passed in 1984,
carried in flame by a man of color
The place where my father was a grocer
with patrons oft in the infancy
of their own rung of enlightenment
Just a few miles from where I grew up
in a town across the county line,
still with remnants of segregation,
in transition to the throes of suburbia

Internalizing my personal sense of justice
through these visions, or TV shows,
the encyclopedia,
or the Fulton County schools teaching on the era of civil rights,
bussing in my best friend in fifth grade
Or the highlight of Hank Aaron circling the bases at his 715th
in the city of Resurgens
defined by its movement away from the old south,
yet shadowed by the darkness carved on Stone Mountain

It hasn't been so long
in smoky blaring rooms and punk bands
Scenes corrupted by manchildren
with shaved heads and white laces on their boots,
commanding attention and disdain,
threatening in their presence,
pushing you and your friends from behind
Their names and faces showing up in journals
of the Southern Poverty Law Center

Just a small slice of my humble young life

Entrenchment doesn't turn on a dime

Remediation doesn't take with turning away

Lifetimes are spent shedding time and trauma

The work is never done.

Matt Mauldin
8/2017
Santa Barbara, CA

Appears in Patterns of Reconciliation

Entrenched Age

Traipsing through an entrenched age,

roots driven subterranean

in search of hydro-enlightened

enchantment of one’s inner-workings

Comments aligned in columns

feeding into loops, a continuation

through where opposing circles conjoin

in vexing intersection

Discourse is relegated to damaged

primacy expressed through the visual

instinct of regurgitation displayed and repulsed

in bizarre mating rituals

The circuit of solemn gestures

gestating full ranges of rationalized existence

through screens of measured response

through uneven channels of despondency

Struck chords resonating archways

into radioactive trenches, the sanctimonious tide

versus the festering stench of caustic

reenactments of the past eternal

Borne on the backs of displacement, dead tides

receding beyond common comprehension

litigated, explained away, justified

in common line formation sway

Through hackneyed points of reference, marked

and linked back to the most recent frame

drawn to the stench like flies circling

tragic exploitation conflated to agendas

Disturbances of this sort are well

established across the landscape, ranging

the scope of tragic myopic monuments

erected in anxious displacement

To the unlikely redemptive dreams

managed from small hours of dwindling night,

through drawn time anesthetizing its way

in light through wandering days

In free exchange through middling layers

we’re entrenched in impressions driven in cast

at surface level and defined in theory

rather than nourished in being

Matt Mauldin
6/2017
Santa Barbara, CA

Appears in Patterns of Reconciliation

Holding On (Final Offering song)

I'm holding on 
to everything you're leaving here
The lies we told ourselves 
somehow came true

Blistering what was held inside,
dilating in light
after being in chasms 
through the time
before all this counted toward the lie
that somehow found its truth

I'm holding on to everything
I don't know 
whether I'll ever see your face again,
even though it represents 
such a turning point

I love you

Matt Mauldin
1995
Atlanta, GA

Rest Impediments

Public Domain

The voice is time draining

its remains through caustic

enclosures, cataclysmic rhythms

raining down god-like structure

on intransigent position

recording its internal dialog

with a well-formed void of spirit

in reeling space

The gray glow outside

casts a hollow sheen surreal

quaking overturned buds kicked off

the tops outstretched and clinched unflowered

spread about the staggered steps

among the ransom’s reason

brought out of solitude unresting

in space invaded

The immediacy in closed eye

fields magnified beyond infernal

periphery pervasive enveloping the voice

piercing the slack surfacing

the perimeter of your person

bridging the barriers of renewal

cross-flowing numb tension

in rest impediments

The words in transposition

line their attack feigning indignity

of the speakers’ holy position within

audible patterns and pieces intersecting      

rims and casings within visions

colored by meters of moments and mileage

unmarked in their distance remaining

unnumbered

Matt Mauldin
6/2017
Santa Barbara, CA

Appearing in Patterns of Reconciliation

News Cycle

1478, Theodoros Pelecanos, Public Domain

Each day is a process

of reconciliation’s stain, upon

the evening’s resolve, dissolving

into folds of a void, shifted through

tension fields and projected

throughout the night’s pattern

of restful disturbance, craning

interruptions

Morning’s horizon beckons

in ominous first light, alighting

a new pattern of mounting

tension cured only by the human

stain of fractured opiate

connection to the first hit

of technology cased

to the dementia, unwinding

symptoms of the dawning day

Repay, wait,

it creeps into your dreams

Matt Mauldin
6/2017
Santa Barbara, CA

Appears in Patterns of Reconciliation