The pale ghost of dawn
A grove of trees
Faded derelicts
Without leaves
A tracery of branches
Bent and twisted
Shades of grey
On a cold, grim day.

Disaffection
Evil minds online
Contempt fro coquetry
Worshippers of perversity
A prelude to profanity
Barely covering
Membranes of morality
On the dark side of the mind.

I will defy the movement of language
With syllables soft before the snow
For Autumn in the fewest chosen words
Along lines of simple alphabets

In the palm of my listening
I will observe you walk as a poem
Skips across ethereally this earth
With colors and bodies of Christmas

An instantaneous impression of beauty
I will sing a lullaby to the irreproachable sky
And kiss the poem-greeting letters
That dissolve as a soul among the trees

And the centre of music
That is a living expression of the times
Today the sun comes out in your poem
And I listen for the poem I will write in reply

I will be a hero of a recluse today, again
With an inner smile of jewel-pointed clarity
That the imagination is a universal thing
The night’s sheerness of black gardens

A voice from which religions spring
Spiritual movement completes itself
In an intuitive release of meaning
A letting go of the sadness of having come

And gone, like death, poetry takes me there
As a river of music, entering my blood
Chilling me with a serotonin symphony
The joy of being here, the glances and reflections

Of existence, mirroring poetry
Between silence and music
The snow and sun, men and women
The rain and drums stalk my fantasies.

There comes a time for realizations.
Realize you aren't perfect so you shouldn't try to
conform to society's shiny little frame of perfection because
it's artificial but defy definitions of
traditional beauty and perfection and create your own meaning
of flawlessness.
Realize beauty from the ashes is the
purest kind of all because
all the ugly has been burnt away.
Realize that the monsters you used to be
afraid of under your bed
are not what you should have been
fearing but the ones inside of your head,
whispering to you alongside
your inner demons and there are things
in life far scarier than the dark.
Realize there are certain types of cold
that are not wintery or measured in temperature,
the kind you don't feel but you become
and that the worst screams are silent
and not produced by lungs
but glassy eyes instead and silence
can be loud and sometimes
just because you are standing in a crowd
doesn't mean you can't be horribly lonely.
these realizations are the definition of pain
but if you trace your scars far enough back
you will find that it was all worth it
considering what you learned in the end.

Love was in the air
causing cardiac arrest
but **you held your breath

© Matthew Harlovic

To write poetry is
To create philosophical memory
To adjust the commentaries

Of all souls, to just one voice
To strip the inequalities
Of existence, of their mass
To write poetry is
To erase the written

Transforming what we have read
Making alphabets contemporary
Fluid, mystical

To write poetry is not just art
It’s neurological reprogramming
A quantum gesture to
The nature of beauty
And Meaning itself

To write poetry is
To return to an absence of meaning
The meddlesome mind forgets

The natural order of nature
To reduce layers of narrative
And return to a total peace
And a grand vision of the universe
As a talking thing, exchanging energy

In a physics of existence
To write poetry is to love the unwritten
Endings that all concur

To identify with the sudden
Rupture of beginnings
From which all thought originates
To write poetry is thus
The silence in between the words

And a solace beyond thought
To free oneself form the memory
That is an impression or a scar

On the mind, blankness is an ideal state
To observe time and space without attachment
To love existence independently
Of the personal conditions of one’s life
On the letters of your poems

I observe a black walking cat
A woman that must question her heart
To find the answers, without
Speaking we are a language
All we feel and do is a kind of vocabulary.

When I was a windy boy and a bit
And the black spit of the chapel fold,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women),
I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood,
The rude owl cried like a tell-tale ***,
I skipped in a blush as the big girls rolled
Nine-pin down on donkey's common,
And on seesaw sunday nights I wooed
Whoever I would with my wicked eyes,
The whole of the moon I could love and leave
All the green leaved little weddings' wives
In the coal black bush and let them grieve.

When I was a gusty man and a half
And the black beast of the beetles' pews
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of *******),
Not a boy and a bit in the wick-
Dipping moon and drunk as a new dropped calf,
I whistled all night in the twisted flues,
Midwives grew in the midnight ditches,
And the sizzling sheets of the town cried, Quick!-
Whenever I dove in a breast high shoal,
Wherever I ramped in the clover quilts,
Whatsoever I did in the coal-
Black night, I left my quivering prints.

When I was a man you could call a man
And the black cross of the holy house,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of welcome),
Brandy and ripe in my bright, bass prime,
No springtailed tom in the red hot town
With every simmering woman his mouse
But a hillocky bull in the swelter
Of summer come in his great good time
To the sultry, biding herds, I said,
Oh, time enough when the blood runs cold,
And I lie down but to sleep in bed,
For my sulking, skulking, coal black soul!

When I was half the man I was
And serve me right as the preachers warn,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of downfall),
No flailing calf or cat in a flame
Or hickory bull in milky grass
But a black sheep with a crumpled horn,
At last the soul from its foul mousehole
Slunk pouting out when the limp time came;
And I gave my soul a blind, slashed eye,
Gristle and rind, and a roarers' life,
And I shoved it into the coal black sky
To find a woman's soul for a wife.

Now I am a man no more no more
And a black reward for a roaring life,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of strangers),
Tidy and cursed in my dove cooed room
I lie down thin and hear the good bells jaw--
For, oh, my soul found a sunday wife
In the coal black sky and she bore angels!
Harpies around me out of her womb!
Chastity prays for me, piety sings,
Innocence sweetens my last black breath,
Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,
And all the deadly virtues plague my death!