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mercury
when you no longer hate the sun for shining
or curse it for bringing life
to our cold blue speck
when you run out of things to say
i will hold your heart in my hand
so you may count the petals of every flower
every hand that held another holds us
ache for me when i am gone
then realize i never leave you
write our manifesto and burn it
our buried chest of golden coins
will grow to a garden of stars
love it for me as if it is our child
my place is with you
we paint the stars together
when no one else is breathing
the moon hides below the horizon
our neighbors rise from beds
like corpses from their graves
unable to recall the songs
the mockingbird performed at 4 a.m.
the wind whistled down the asphalt
haunted only by coyotes
my modern mercury’s caduceus
is a radio tower pulsing
between realms like dreams
the serpents of his staff
become iron girders riveted to the sky
broadcasting love and fury
to the sons and daughters of lightning
spanning the globe under incandescent shelter
from midnight’s prehistoric treachery
clarity
communication
the courier’s gift
signals the dawn
This poem appears in the collection Inner Planets: 50 Poems by Matthew Howard. Available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook.
Mars Will Send No More 
Why Minimalism?
This is a new approach to poetry for me, leaving out capital letters and most punctuation. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. This blog and workshops help me try things out and get feedback.
This poem, and the previous one about Mars, continue a minimalist approach I tried for Neptune. Neptune, all alone out there at the edge of the solar system in a vast emptiness only broken by the Kuiper Belt, deserved a sparse, desolate poem, and stripping out any punctuation that wasn’t absolutely necessary to convey meaning felt right.
Mars continued that idea, not because Mars is similarly sparse but because Neptune had made me think about what mechanics are really necessary in a poem.
Mercury takes it to a further extreme. And here, ambiguity about where sentences end creates an extra layer of meaning. There are a few places where you could read a sentence stopping at the end of the stanza, OR continuing into the next one, and it colors the meaning you’ll get.
As an editor and writer, I am constantly called on to be a master of formal punctuation and grammar. Poetry offers an escape from the rigid, rational approach my work calls for – an opportunity to strip language down to its basics and rebuild it from its simplest parts. We’ll see if this minimal approach proves effective, or if I learn anything from it.
If you liked the recent series of poems based on Holst’s planets, you’ll be happy to discover it’s part of a larger group project called Poetry of the Planets. The author who created the project built some 3D installations in a virtual world, and the idea is to immerse yourself there while listening to Holst’s Planets Suite and write poems based on your experience. I am just one of many people creating poems in response to this project, so go check out some more! The project continues through May, 2017.
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