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the poet
Matthew M C Smith, a Welsh poet from Swansea, is editor and founder of Black Bough Poetry. His poems have been in Anti-Heroin Chic, Barren Magazine, Icefloe Press, Wellington Street Review, Other Terrain and Fly on the Wall Press. Matthew is writing his second collection after his debut, Origin: 21 Poems.
the poems
Cool Oblivion
‘ ... llithro i’r llonyddwch mawr yn ôl.’
from T H Parry Williams’Dychwelyd
Choose life;
extract yourself from systems,
circuits, voices, spies in ether.
Crawl as servant, slave
from your masters,
take freedom in roadless deserts.
Leave gasfields burning.
Echoes in canyons, drift of caverns,
find your channel in rock,
seeking nothing, nothing at all.
Close your mind in cool oblivion,
hide inside your silent shadow,
where blood slows to deep time’s pulse.
Dying King
I am with you. I am always with you.
You pulse with a click of the drive.
The dying king.
I press your paper-thin
shroud of skin, as thumbs curl
over balsa bones, ridges royal.
My eyes probe famine’s fault lines,
scan this lucent husk,
your twilight mask.
Under your arm,
now thin, translucent, I once slept,
sheltered from terrors in the night.
Now, I keep watch.
How did it come to this?
Morphine dulls your silent ward. It keeps you
from fires in the fields,
from the sibilant hiss of the underworld,
the gaping maw of night.
We are skin, my dark
follows your dark.
*
Above tides, I feel winds of unconquerable spirit.
I stand at the edge, choking with loss.
Cosmology
from static
we make our slow Rosetta
linger lone
in void of dark
no one
can hear us
in these rooms
of silence
this is our language
of stars
fingers of intricate play
& movement
there are lights
faint and far
as moths we are drawn
& dance
Publishing credits
Cool Oblivion / Cosmology: IceFloe Press (February 29th 2020)
Dying King: Anti-Heroin Chic