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Matthew M C Smith

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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.

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the poems

Cool Oblivion

'... llithro i’r llonyddwch mawr yn ôl.'

from T H Parry Williams' Dychwelyd
00:00 / 01:23
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Choose life;
extract yourself from systems,
circuits, voices, spies in ether.

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Crawl as servant, slave
from your masters,
take freedom in roadless deserts.

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Leave gasfields burning.

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Echoes in canyons, drift of caverns,
find your channel in rock,
seeking nothing, nothing at all.

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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

00:00 / 01:51
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I am with you. I am always with you.

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You pulse with a click of the drive.
The dying king.

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I press your paper-thin
shroud of skin, as thumbs curl

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over balsa bones, ridges royal.
My eyes probe famine’s faultlines,

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scan this lucent husk,
your twilight mask.

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Under your arm,
now thin, translucent, I once slept,
 
sheltered from terrors in the night.
Now, I keep watch.

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How did it come to this?

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Morphine dulls your silent ward. It keeps you
from fires in the fields,

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from the sibilant hiss of the underworld,
the gaping maw of night.

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We are skin, my dark
follows your dark.

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                        *

 

Above tides, I feel winds of unconquerable spirit.
I stand at the edge, choking with loss.

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Cosmology

00:00 / 00:50
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from static
                         we make our slow Rosetta
linger lone
                         in void of dark

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no one
                         can hear us
in these rooms
                         of silence

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this is our language
                         of stars
fingers of intricate play
                         & movement

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there are lights
                         faint and far
as moths we are drawn
                         & dance

Publishing credits

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Cool Oblivion / Cosmology: IceFloe Press

Dying King: Anti-Heroin Chic

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