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Matthew M C Smith
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.
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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 faultlines,
​
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
