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
And you?
What did you learn from this hustling
of uncoined phrases, all your half-baked cliches;
this churning of the metaphorical as if in a mixer;
blending, blaspheming, bloodcurdling crude
attempts to return your lost coin toss to its original form;
this reconstituting of what remains;
pouring yourself into a new mould,
scraping bottoms, patting yourself down,
letting it rest, yet shoving it in, unheated,
unlubricated, impatiently baking the unreal,
making all this ovened hurt real,
letting it sink in the middle,
collapse, fail?
And I?
What did I expect from this careening unrest?
This unexpected restlessness, the mess left behind
from this burning, the lessons learnt from well-meaning
intentions now a cold hearth of cinders, charred, crumbling,
craven desire, scorched yearnings, still railing at your derailment,
trackless ignorance, runaway naïveté, off-track, loose
caboose, leaping, rolling, flipping
heads or tails. I lose.
We both lose.
First published in Blue Crystal Literary Magazine, Cultural Festa: Verses Woven in Spirit of Culture, United Kingdom, available on Amazon at https://a.co/d/18E7E2e
