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

Placeholder

Placeholder

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

Placeholder

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

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