We are selling the metal that kills
so we can afford the spoons that feed our children;
then killing them with the metal that we’ve just sold
feeding them with the blood on the spoons from happy meals.

We place them in the hands of our enemy –
How far into this storm must we all walk before we feel the cold?
preferring the shine of killing steel that glinting blue in falling skies
than the breath with flesh applied – prescribing to gain from the metals of subtraction.

The daylight would be our undoing
eyes were transfixed by computer generated handshakes –
division of the heart and soul the lies are the truths of man’s inked ruin
where only smoke rings travel along carpets like tiny drunken mice.

Poems have appeared in The Journal, Prole, The Dawntreader, Ink, Sweat, and Tears, Harbinger Asylum, and The Seventh Quarry. In 2015 Matt won the erbacce prize for poetry with his first collection Dystopia 38.10 and in 2016 he won the Into the Void Poetry Prize. He has a new chapbook out called Metropolis with Hunting Raven Press.

Every night I listen to a man going mad.
It starts with the moving of wardrobes
the wincing cry through thin plasterboard,
a building crescendo of expletives
repeated again and again –
at the voices that surround him.

Every night I listen to a man going mad
until one night the screams pause
no sound of friction behind these thin walls;
just rolling sirens melting in windows
that blue and red repetition –
every night I listen to a man going mad.

Poems have appeared in The Journal, Prole, The Dawntreader, Ink, Sweat, and Tears, Harbinger Asylum, and The Seventh Quarry. In 2015 Matt won the erbacce prize for poetry with his first collection Dystopia 38.10 and in 2016 he won the Into the Void Poetry Prize. He has a new chapbook out called Metropolis with Hunting Raven Press.