Cold as ice cutting in from the dark, eyes, eyes, eyes.

Slicing, mangling holding from the start, eyes, eyes eyes.

Calm and cool, blue gazing in from the mark, eyes, eyes, eyes.

Made of crystal, made of glass, made from the shrouds of the live in your past.

There they whisper and there they stand, made of younger ones on land.

Who doesn’t shout, and who doesn’t whisper, when the eyes go out with a whimper

Looking, watching, carefully talking, eyes, eyes, eyes.

Staring, and reaching with cold slender hands, eyes, eyes eyes.

Grabbing, folding, breaking bone, eyes, eyes, eyes.

Watching sleeping children lie, eyes, eyes, eyes.

Knows the nightmares of your life, eyes eyes eyes.

Shaking and waking from the night, eyes eyes eyes.

There when you wake, and there when you sleep eyes eyes eyes.

Just to manage just to listen when the foul come in betwixt, sold into labor, sold into pain, where no one wills start again, cut inside, and cut beneath, all of the qualms kept unsheathed, full of hatred and starting fire, made stone, and sung on the lire, captured crystal cunning cauldrons made of lucid fire callings, which all echo and let with steel, the sound cries and lies you feel, eyes eyes eyes.

     Hold on to the time that moves past in waves the shake and rumble underground. I can feel your pulse as it alters the composition of each leaf that blows by my humbled ears. In the winter’s breeze I can hear constant references to the things that make me smile. I can hear echos of your voice from wherever you are.

     It’s getting closer to the time as weeks blow by like paper rolls of dust that used to carry fancy messages scrawled in careful red ink. Whenever I try and translate the thoughts around your head I wonder why you didn’t just choose a monotone color, the kind that echoes the splotches of dead grass that didn’t make it through winter.

     Because of the caves that we’ve collectively spelunked, we thought we could hold onto the treasure that made us so much more, but even now I can feel it fading from the grasp of my fingers as the curl to where a slender hand used to be. And I don’t know what type of cold air is blowing through the holes in my bones, but I may crumble at any second.

     I used all of the struggle left inside of the furnace you used to kindle to place my ear to the earth and listen one last time to the heartbeat of you flooring yourself to the earth with dainty steps.

     I used the rest of my youth trying to scrape up the dust from your footsteps in hopes that I could reassemble them into the holiest homilies projected by the changing tide of ink that depicted the trials of life and liberty from each lingering idea.

     I used my last bit of paper to scrawl a note then let it carry on in the breeze that may one day return to the voice of the one who spoke it. Now more than ever I need someone to hear that voice and cheer it on.

     I used the last of my words to depict in you the carefullest messages of pain that we should all carry together. I used that time to whisper I love y-

     And now that time has tried and wavered in its barks and wrath, I find the heart beat fading. It wasn’t the cruelest combination of barks and bites that would sway the beating to stop, or even the cruelest combination of lacerations disposed over time to the barren flesh of what we considered our morals. Now all we can do kneel, covered in blood, pumping our limbs and lungs in an attempt to resuscitate the dead with CPR.

I recently went out and saw the Protomen, and trust me their live stuff is fantastic. Each bit of their concert is perfectly theatrical in just the right ways, trust me on this. If you ever get a chance to support them by seeing them live go out and take it. I’m signed on to be part of a big project that I’m very excited about, I’ll put up more details in the near future.

Love you all

-Matthew

Sniveled crooked teeth caught on dense nylon rope. This was the feeling Petersburg felt when his boss began pushing a metal plunger against his face. His boss, angry at Petersburg for accidentally hanging up on his wife, took a bat to his lowly accountant’s face then in a fervent burst of fear began trying to plunge the cracked teeth and blood either down his face or into the plunger. His boss hadn’t decided what the intended effect of the plunger was, but knew that Petersburg had medical insurance from the internet marketing company they both worked for. This was a small mercy though seeing as the medical insurance would not pay for the fake molded teeth that Petersburg would need if he managed to escape the building. Petersburg’s boss continued pumping the plunger up and down on a another ugly face, while low gurgles echoed form the back of the bathroom they were in, it sounded as if a garbage disposal swallowed too much cow beef and was slowly jamming itself on the layers of fat and bone before shuddering to shocking halt causing the entire house to lose power. This may have been due to the insane amounts of blood or the copious amounts of liquid feces engrained around the plunger head. Petersburg’s boss just realized this hall was where Dalton used the bathroom everyday. Dalton… with the bowel problems, Dalton who everyday at 6 would stuff the toilets with human shit due to his “gland problems” and force Sandy, the unfortunate female custodian, to work an extra 20 minutes cleaning and freshening the toilet. A procedure that involved “More Mr. Clean than a full meth lab enema.” To this day nobody knew what she meant, and even less people knew whether to feel offended or not. Anyway Petersburg’s boss was using that plunger, and the gurgling was finally stopping as Petersburg keeled over twitching, a ring of brown around his nose and mouth. His boss stood over him wiping his hands on Petersburg’s fancy 4 dollar tie from goodwill.

Bleak iced over streets that rope around the buildings where children used to play. Taken over by grunge ridden venues where sad music pours out of washed out buildings. Two young kids sit swinging pushing each other on swings made of summer wind, now pushing needles into each other’s eyes to keep love alive. Cold splashing water against the stone where we used to swim turned sour by waste form the factory where our parents worked. A single silver motorcycle rides by casting dust on its rusting frame as two children comb broken glass away from the flat tires. An alley where Susan would play make believe with chalk monsters drawn elegantly in tender scrawl, now wrought with real monsters who hold dice in between their teeth, who hold lust in their eyes. A cold breath expanding over the city turning each setting dream into a nightmare. The youth toss and turn in oceans of blankets as parents toss and turn in debts accumulated to ensure they don’t toss and turn in bed sheets. Houses turn into snares for dissenters with scythes who declare nonchalance with a wine bottle. The vagabonds are called upon to act as tipping points for street fair ball and cup games. The coldness embellishes the streets with talking tendrils the pull on each runaway, beckoning them to the freedom of home. At the end of the tears there grumbling shady figures dressed in fedora’s with clawed hands that dig against the cement. Bones pop and crackle as they move on a track sent straight for the underside of your eyelids. Where they hover over you whispering depression into your ears and dripping hot air against your silent face. Eyes made of mildew that expands across their face, and giant clawed scars left from the ones that turned them in their foreheads. They breath, and suck the life out of the soft brained, until all that’s left is snake skin. They dress to hide their lack of skin, due to the bones that shake from beneath. Those who dare to open their eyes are turned, unless they share in the misery of those around. Sometimes if those lucky enough to look cast their glance in just the right way a dice will roll, and the city will be pulled back by a giant spring.

So just so you guys know, my posts have been pretty irregular due to the huge amount of schoolwork and physics now present in my life. Thanks for being so understanding, and thanks for reading. Have a lovely romance in the mean time or something.

-Matthew (Happily Hopeless Poetics)

The wash of cold water over a face made of plaster. It moves creaking coolly against the folds of flesh glued to its slender frame. Ice impressed on the eyes so that it can’t see the truth bound and gagged by the snow bound bluffs. A timbered lichen festering in the belly button of the mannequin, as time ticks down slowly on the hopes of a model dressed in poorly ordained adornments. An icy leper looking, licking his hollow lips at the fullness of an empty smile forced for a lens. The tight pull of measuring tape as it circumvents a smashed can frame, barring ribs acting as causeways for support on an otherwise cavernous maw. Each snap striking hard against the tethered hands on a generation of girls, each tempered glance freezing them slowly into mannequins to be taken aboard. Aboard a ship that’s sinking down into the depths that used to be dreams of a mother for her beautiful daughter, now cast down to drown amongst the bone yard of each fasted ghost. Each smelter frame beats down on the ground hoping to drive from them the echoes of respiration that yield life into their nimble bodies. As they break down and drive each plastic arm into the earth they plant the seeds of tomorrow’s quiet weeping generation. Rotted teeth that show an edifice of white against cheek bones made to hold the slabs of skin that pitch like canvases decorated in Dior paints that lend a mosaic of crushing defeat for the ideals of tomorrow. Size 0 aluminum sheaths designed to hold empty space wrapped in Christmas paper tidings, but never used to wrap any gifts. Each foreboding flower a dried dangling corpse in a field of dry dangling corpses that emit and forewarn of a coming plague that will wipe from the fertile land each unique petal that is evoked by spring. Each tide turns the land more grey until each flower struck from the earth is embossed in plaster and shaped into a hand reaching out to obtain sunlight through its plastic surface until all that is left is crushing remorse to feed the roots. When the sun wafts by all it can see from it’s perch are thousands of tender hands clawing up to grab a piece of warmth, only to fall prey to the clutch of death in the evenings that never end. Since the only smile they can ever wear is the one cast from beneath dirt, forced by a man with a camera yelling in slithering vibes to look like you just died, or else no one will think you were ever alive. From the cast iron sprockets of water and wine, there turns one more child to say she’s alive, by watching a monitor dressed in its best, as it turns one by one and gives the true test, by mulching and feeding the young minds eye, it’ll catch another all up in its lies, till turning a wheel all made of muck, there will be one more corpse caught in the muck.

This time to rehearse a special small verse that is short on the live wire but active in the present tense from the special edged welded means to a peaceful end. Sometimes the solutions to all of our problems sets well with some smoother relaxation from the colder beliefs that we all bred from our educations. But taking time from each day to spend away the wasted moments I’ve saved up with long hours of tireless work at a keyboard fueled with fire and remorseful thoughts that I’ve directed at those I’ve left behind. It hurts me to know that maybe somewhere they still wish on the ideas of what I could do for them as a martyr, but in believing in tomorrow means remembering the work that we could maybe do locked in a library late at night in a special enclosed space made of stacks on stack on stacks. So it’s worth rehearsing if only for a moment the life worth saving with a single quick saying that I’ve been well versed in, unless we buckle down to the knife’s end cut into our childhoods by teacher’s with botched tongues that have been dipped in tax collector acid. Each word erodes at the mystery of what could be by producing the future generation of naysayers and disbelievers in the future of a race of radical republicans and moderate liberals alike. Where each tune tying, organ playing, appositive with an afro who has a no show to each class where they were told to deposit their dreams on reconciled tender report cards reading “well yes they did well, but they didn’t follow the direction of the teacher.” But fuck that broken type of reasoning, truth isn’t found by chasing the tails of some imaginary revolutionary, the best way to spark up the ideas of the lost minds of the counterculture youth who sold out on girth is to get them to think out loud where they can be judged. Let them appeal to the fates of boldness or sin, of firepower and din, where they can get blasted for ignorance and self derived autonomy. Let them get crushed down one thousand times to find something worth dying for, just so they can come back to die for that idea one more time. And again, and again. It’s the clockwork tempo that ticks ticks ticks itself dead with each passing arm of breath that we let into each others’ pens when we’re trying to blow the ideas out of each cartridge of ink. Being safe, who does that, except for maybe this, which was rehearsed in limericks shined in opposition to that mirror like face which reflects the lost dreams of a boy from California living it up big in a forest in Tanzania, or so he believes. Maybe you could call it love, but to say so definitely would break the rhythm within the memoir’s written on the back of a napkin where I write all my speeches. Sometime the best idea is the one where I make a mistake that shows my true character, like the drunk man telling his wife he’s married. Go grab that knife and let’s tear apart this preconceived notion of romance, we can reinvent it with a glance, give me that smile and open stride let’s abdicate and reinstate our ideas to a new claim to life. So maybe I love you.

In the wretched cold of the winter time it’s okay to suffer from the symptoms of loneliness. Hear each syllable cut away at the vocalization of your sorrow, and take the time to put each one in a crib made of tissues. Hold on tight to the world you love so dearly, because it’s running away from you. The trotter of each step signals you to reconvene on a date when there’s more sunlight to be felt. Each pitter patter of rain against the pavement where you knelt marking the footsteps you took from the room where you buried your dreams.

On certain days when the light catches just right, your dark eyes light up in just the right way allowing a warm homely light to emanate from your eyes. On days like that for just a few moments their seems to be more than all of the problems in the world. As foolish as it seems, and as sad as the world is, it makes everything all the better to know that for just a moment the silence in your eyes is unmasked to reveal a collective of raucous forest animals racing through the underbrush of a nightmare casting light on all the shadows. To make all of the shadows come up into the dusk you’d stare at the sun. All day. For hours you would sit and stare watching the ball of light for just that one moment of clarity so that things fall into place despite the broken remnants of our sunken lives. Because you tried so hard, and blinded yourself on the joy of a thousand glimmering sunsets, there was an unspoken promise despite the best efforts to liberate the seeds from the fruit. A sparking coil that cold fuses iron to gold. A curved road in the distance that winds down a thousand empty walled caves, where light treads carefully for fear of stirring the dark. And hand in hand, we traced the curves of our empty ideas, filing them with the substance of our heartfelt exchange. As you drive hand pressed loosely against the clutch that reminds the world of the clubs used to stir your tears into the content of you are today, I would stare down the curved roads before us. Watch them sway and break. Watch them curve and shift. Watch them wind and drop below the surface, revealing the tender undersides of a figure wrapped in bed sheets. Though a loose leafed book was scattered around your room after we arrived at our destination, we can count the scratches on the wall hiding the closet where you bury your secrets. We can find each and every nail and pull it out, but the wound will always bleed. So I pressed my hand against yours as you drove against the backdrop of a setting sun as your car stinted to a halt as the gas depletes. Then you take a handful of iced over water bottles and look deep into my eyes, and as the sun sets the light catches perfectly. Perfect water drops form on the outside of the bottles of water running down like beads of sweat on your face as you lay mangled and barbed from the razor wire wrapped around your tender ankles, and the down blanket where I thought I would always hold you fell away, and gave rise to the blood pocked symmetry of the female body. In time I would always remember the look of desperation behind the gestures you made telepathically to those who burst in your room, the curving of the bedside littered in needles and knives just like the roadside we broke down on. The sweeping motion of your elegant gestures, a silhouette against the wide woods stretched before us. Your voice carried away the fireflies and lassoed them in, and as you spoke you sang of days past where bright lights would flicker past the skeletons we fought over the course of our early days. Each note and lovely tone lit up the night sky and as you held the cold water against my face fireworks went off and caught your eyes in just the right way. You danced then your hair streaking pewter sheen masking the emptiness of the field in a hallowed, blessed, light. The whole time the shock of the fireworks and the cold of the bottles kept me more awake than I’ve ever been… Until the day I held my head underwater, and I came up in your room. Clutching against me the tide of flesh that was once more than tissue. The cracked crags in your flesh exposing the molten tides of blood you valued so much. I drowned. I drowned. I drowned. I drowned. I drowned in everything you’ve ever said. In everything you’ve ever thought. In all of those good ideas you said were diamond pearls. In all the simple sounds, and elegant gestures, in all the stories, in every breath, in all of the tears, in all of the smiles, in all of the dreams in all of the ice in all of the sun in all of the smells in all of the laughs in all of the moments in all of the late night in all of the awkward silences in all of the tender moments in all of the mistakes in all of the perfect smiles in all of the beautiful spiritual ideas in all of the in all of the in all of the in all of the in all of the in all the in all all all all all all. I drowned. In all of those days when you promised we would follow down all of those curved roads I never expected the car to crash. I never will expect to. Because in the end all there ever will be was the light in your eyes. All there ever was, was a promise between two empty minds to salute the sun at the end of our pathways. And though the way was mangled and torn, there will never be a day better when you weren’t there.