Introducing a new series of poems by Julian Matthews. Julian is a writer and Pushcart-nominated poet published in The American Journal of Poetry, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Borderless Journal, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Dream Catcher Magazine, Live Encounters Magazine, Lothlorien Poetry Journal and The New Verse News, among others. He is a mixed-race minority from Malaysia and lived in Ipoh for seven years. Currently based in Petaling Jaya, he is a media trainer and consultant for senior management of multinationals on Effective Media Relations, Social Media and Crisis Communications. He was formerly a journalist with The Star and Nikkei Business Publications Inc
Link: https://linktr.ee/julianmatthews
By Julian Matthews
Get up!
I lie in bed, saying I’ll rise in my own time. But you speak of rising like a phoenix from ashes. You go on about Lazarus and Mary and Jesus and I’m just talking about waking up a deadened heart from all this mourning. You speak of the sun and tides, spaceships and global warming, mounting inflation and the price of eggs. I’m just trying to lift this fog in my head, the yeast in my deflated bread. I’m not the beggar outside church seeking alms for his bandaged leg, the communion of bloody sin, charity that is guiltily-led.
Snap out of it! you say
Like I was a TV, and you the remote. The one we can never find, hidden in the black holes of the couch where you often see me slouched, when all the starlight in my eyes has gone out. I’m not wise, nor a king. It’s not a star nor a saving I am seeking. There is no biblical prophecy speaking of my coming. I am not a dutiful scribe of old either, duplicating sacred text in longhand, elegant and cursive like my father’s. My brain is percussive, it beats to a different spiritual tune. It’s the shorthand of doom-scrolling of things unfolding before me from near and afar. I try to listen, absorb and comprehend.
Can you not hear humanity pleading to be seen?
Let the pretentious pretend. I am not heaven-sent and this is no wonderland. I don’t need northern lights to bore you like Alice. Even the priest needs a chalice, a container for miracles to happen in. My cup may be broken and not runneth over but at least I am still open to receiving. A seeker of subjective truth from this bombardment of outworldly deceiving. Hear me out: Before Lazarus got the command to wake up from his cave, weren’t tears shed? For how else can anyone remove grave-clothes and arise, without the gift of human longing? Let’s be clear too that our sun never rises, it’s mother earth that gratefully spins. And tides don’t just come in, it’s the moon’s gravitational pull that begets the churning. Perhaps to sound out its displeasure, for its own unwavering earthly yearnings.
Do you not hear the waves crash with so much sadness and anger?
No, I do not ask of you to share in one or the other. My despair is my own. I own it. It’s mine and mine alone. I am an excavator of the uploaded. I pore over digital repositories of verses, hoarded legacies of the poetic hoards. I move forward in reverse. I try to be a tiny lighting rod for the collective unconscious.
The sound of its thunder keeps me awake all night. It’s the poet’s curse of undiscovered light.
Do you not hear the hum of the universe, as I do? Do you not know that scientists have discovered it too?
They say it’s the “constant of gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of the universe, caused by the motion of giant, accelerating celestial bodies.” A tuned string in another theory of synchronicity. There’s just one inconsistency: it’s the melody of you and me. Eight billion heartbeats are still not in harmony. Generational trauma buried deep in our psyche. There’s no promise of ever resurrecting here. We are too wrapped up in our own fear. The universe’s rhyme – and our reason for being – are not in sync. We are the missing link!
Then you reply, I love you, anyway,
I acquiesce and rise.
First published in Mayari Literature Journal, Volume 2 Issue 4, San Francisco, USA.
