frontier

Tags

animal inside you, frontier, Moon, planets, poems, poetry

Frontier

Luna, our beloved crescent,
you swell until you are full enough
to hang heavy against the horizon
like the breast of a pregnant woman.

You will be the first we settle,
our laboratory to test survival
on other stones that fill the sky and
telescopes. How could we resist touching you?

Will you shudder with pleasure
beneath our fingertips, or recoil
at the machines and metallic intrusions,
the rivets and girders of our civilization?

You have been our goddess
since before the dawn of history.
Now we will bring you atmosphere
and mark you with our scent.

We have always been inseparable.
Now we will be close.

This poem appears in the collection Inner Planets: 50 Poems by Matthew Howard. Available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook.

 

venus

Tags

animal inside you, gustav holst, planets, poems, poetry, Venus

Venus

Second daughter of the sun,
Holst imagined peace in your embrace.

Without a moon of your own
you thirsted for the man
to caress your cloudy tresses
with cellos and rapture.

But without his fantasy
he could never survive your
pressure, such peerless heat
dripping sulfurous sweat.

Volcanoes erupt and
recarve your surface again
and again until they render you
unrecognizable.

Yet Gustav dreamed of you,
and in the lies one’s mind
spins while sleeping

he saw you not as you are
but as he wished you to be:
tender, resplendent, radiant.

aurora

Tags

animal inside you, aurora, dawn, earth, poems, poetry, sun

Aurora

Do you have the courage to be loved by the sun?
What daughter of Earth can bear his solar flare?

Better perhaps to write your verses in dark
deep forests where hushed voices of deer
have only the moon to contend with.

Better perhaps to fold your sails and choose
for your harbor a cove where his scalding corona
remains a whispered legend.

But you, daughter of soil and wind
of leaves and blades of grass, you
who have known fear but once and never again,

your defiance carries you up the peaks
and into the light.

You cast aside your gown of slumber
to weave the dawn into your tresses.

You gather flocks of songbirds
to nest in your palms and encircle you.

Robed in such finery, you welcome him.

watercolor

Tags

animal inside you, dreams, painting, poems, poetry, watercolor

Watercolor

Painted butterfly bushes
and permanent flowers
whose colors never fade.

Here, a panther can dream
or a child, even children
whose bodies time has aged.

Some verdant forests are
denied the waking and only
grow in starlight, real

or imagined. When you look
with your heart and not your eyes
you see a different truth.

—for CK

This poem appears in the collection Inner Planets: 50 Poems by Matthew Howard. Available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook.

annual

Tags

animal inside you, Annual, new year, poems, poetry

art generated by Midjourney

Annual

Tonight you will take time to remember
why you could not tell her everything:

why galaxies weep and clovers sing
why each raindrop forgets its name
before it strikes the ground.

Tonight Venus the evening star
will shine brightly enough to inspire myth
but not illuminate a forest.

You will notice a shade of green in the sunset
unlike anything which came before.

You will remember how to dance
but forget how to walk.

No consolation awaits you in the
brick broken alleys between here
and home.

Nothing heals a hopeless heart like the dawn
and mockingbird song strewn across playgrounds
and parking lots in random perfection.

But that must wait until tomorrow.
Your name means nothing to you now
but you will choose one that does.

Think of the animals whose lives you stole
and the ones you cared for. Then ask yourself
how they are any different.

Think of the exceptions to every rule
then realize they are the norm.
Consider why we began breaking laws
in the first place.

Recall Pluto has not completed
a single solar orbit since we discovered it
then stripped it of its planetary status.

Our new year does not belong to the outer planets.
They have their own sense of scale and scope.

If you ever wonder if something as small
as a bee or an ant can feel love
then you don’t understand yourself at all.

Remember this tonight when you stumble home
at 3 a.m. clutching the walls and
groping the empty city.

Remember this when you
break your resolutions tomorrow but hold on
to promises you never intend to abandon.

Tattoo your body with stars
and understand it means
we could never leave each other.

Where could we possibly go that we could not
be together? What canvas in all of history
could have been painted, if not by us?

Our hands held the brushes
as they hold each other now.
We could not let go without
taking all of geology with us
like continents.

This poem appears in the collection Inner Planets: 50 Poems by Matthew Howard. Available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook.

tribute

Tags

animal inside you, poems, poetry, raven, tribute

Tribute

Her majesty the raven
dressed in afternoon sunlight
gilding her feathers with liquid fire.

Owning nothing,
she takes what she needs.

Her empire begins above your head.
Air currents sustain her, lift her
giving grace and meaning to her wings.

This she accepts as her rightful tribute
her payment for centuries of survival
and her genius in conquering gravity.

Spying her mate, she sails the sky
carrying her prize in a beak as black
as the flag of no nation.

Solar gold, stolen silver
and her lover’s heart:

What will not last forever
today belongs to her.

 

This poem appears in the collection Inner Planets: 50 Poems by Matthew Howard. Available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook.

solstice

Tags

animal inside you, australia, poems, poetry, solstice

art generated by Midjourney

Solstice

My antipodean sister, today is your longest day
but here, our shortest. I grow jealous of your sunlight
though you are the moon who shines in daytime.

I need days that last forever, open and unending
while you crave black-walled rooms and curtains
to deny the outside world and murder it.

These are trivialities. Your heart beats like mine.
It knows the rhythm of the seasons we cannot escape.
They enslave us and they liberate us
and we cannot tell the difference.

Beneath your radiant southern cross
you sing and paint with light to create new worlds.
You, my partner in musical treason,
my inversion who lives one day into the future,

we are not so different: two halves of a sine wave.
My troughs are your peaks
though I cannot touch nor hold your hand.

Our amplitudes are one heartbeat:
the same symphony, the inhalation and exhalation.
Water crashes into sand as far as the eye can see.

You made a home for that part of me too wild to settle down.
I could not repay you with all the gold stolen
from a thousand papist galleons.
But this is no transaction.

The family we are born into
is not the family we meet later,
the one who resonates with us and
cares more for who we are than what we were.

This poem appears in the collection Inner Planets: 50 Poems by Matthew Howard. Available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook.

orchestra

Tags

animal inside you, orchestra, poems, poetry

Orchestra

Some songs fade like old photographs.
Others change our lives
and stay with us always.

An orchestra could not do you justice
unless the score was revolution.
I listen to you so loud it hurts.

Long after our sun grows red
to devour her planetary children,
our elements will find a new star, together.

carving

Tags

animal inside you, carving, grand canyon, poems, poetry

Carving

When she loves you she will prove it
with glacial patience and eternities of storms
carving sacred geologies into your planetary skin

filling it with peaks and gorges
majestically dismembered terrains
where jaguars roam in shadows

where seekers quest for visions that often find them
but other times escape to nests
like birds on the edge of a thundercloud.

Mark this place with petroglyphs
so you will never forget
here you drank the dew and starved

for one more drop
one more sign she cared
when every crevice of the world dripped evidence.

Paint the animals you hunted in her caves
then realize they are you and never hunt again.
You don’t need to search. You are not lost.

You are here in the palm of her hand
the gully between her breasts
and the soft forgotten folds of prehistory.

If you look up into the rain and drink it
you already know everything you need.
Caress the canyon and dance

in its unrelenting atmosphere
like all the other trees whose limbs embrace
and interpenetrate her like capillaries.

Dreams are mirrors. Fools refuse their gaze.
You can see it all from here
and she can see inside you too.

 

This poem appears in the collection Inner Planets: 50 Poems by Matthew Howard. Available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook.

writing

Tags

animal inside you, poems, poetry, writing

Writing

She had no patience for anyone
who had not set themselves on fire.

It wasn’t a game to her, or an idle pastime.
It mattered in a way you couldn’t understand

until flames crawled up your skin from the pyre
consuming all you loved

boiling the blood in your veins
and filling your eyes with landscapes you’d never seen before.

That’s the kind of woman she was.
She wanted more than to go out with a bang.

She wanted you to take everything with you.
If you couldn’t, then it never belonged to you in the first place.

This poem appears in the collection Inner Planets: 50 Poems by Matthew Howard. Available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook.

edifice

Tags

animal inside you, edifice, poems, poetry

Edifice

The city crumbles and takes her with it,
her portrait painted on its aging skin.

They should have sprayed her over metal
so she could live forever

like guitar riffs in a basement
and lovers we will never meet.

Instead, she’s been falling apart since day one,
a persona stenciled on concrete

barely more permanent than flesh.
Her heart refuses to break

but the surrounding world is falling apart
and always will be

and she is one with it and it is her and she is
all the things we should have listened to

but ignored
like our bodies

the substrate we grow on
the lines and cracks of age

the structures of civilization
and all it pretends to be.

 

This poem appears in the collection Inner Planets: 50 Poems by Matthew Howard. Available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook.

fearless

Tags

animal inside you, fearless, Patches, poems, poetry

Fearless

Naked, we run at night
caring nothing for heat or cold

only for what can be killed
only for what is ours.

We mark it, maul it
and make it our own.

This battleground
is our sole inheritance

and we have no prayer
of leaving it alive.

Doubt we never entertain
nor fear

nor hesitance.
We leap into the unknown

and if it will not catch us,
then we die.

But what is that
to immortals?

petals

Tags

animal inside you, petals, poems, poetry

Petals

Black daisy.
A kiss we already forgot.

I no longer taste
your salt on my tongue.
The skin healed shut.

Pull me apart again.
I never wish
for peaceful days.

I crave days that boil,
days filled with sun
destroying everything

except my blossoms.
They bloom for you.

They bloom for you
and they bleed.

This poem appears in the collection Inner Planets: 50 Poems by Matthew Howard. Available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook.

doll

Tags

animal inside you, doll, poems, poetry

Doll

She grows wings that beat the air
until it roars in turbulent currents.

She writes love letters in the dark
with invisible ink in a language
that belongs only to us.

Our hearts are made from stars.
The smallest atoms contain planetary landscapes
we can touch, together.

They will never leave us. Our gravity owns them.
Nowhere in the night sky will you find anything
that is not ours.

We are sisters of the same moon
whose web of light is our home
whose phases wax and wane in time with our bodies.

We can fly to anywhere from here.
Come into my arms and dream.
I have something to show you.

This poem appears in the collection Inner Planets: 50 Poems by Matthew Howard. Available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook.

singer

Tags

animal inside you, poems, poetry, singer

Singer

She wasn’t pretty like a model,
not the kind of beauty who disappeared
when the makeup came off.
She was something else,

a song that gets better year after year,
one you appreciate on new levels
the deeper you go.

You didn’t need to know the names of
her musicians to understand her song.
You could even get the words wrong.
It only mattered that you listened.

This poem appears in the collection Inner Planets: 50 Poems by Matthew Howard. Available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook.