Poetry by Matt Duggan

One Million Tiny Cuts

How did you cope with the first tiny cut?
the milk that drained from the soul.
Did that cut lay inscribed on your back?
how did the mechanism work for you.

Some never reveal their first tiny cut
thin tissue that departed into liquid,
shrugged as a learning curve of emotions
while other’s build a solid resistance;

killing sorrow before it spreads into their blood
age will always teach us the value
in the cracks that will reappear,  

as they do not see the one million tiny cuts
embellished on your back which strengthens resolve,
in a battlefield where you feed on another tiny cut.

​


A Portrait of Park Benches

Summer evening in June
a square field in short embers
long emerald –
frozen crow like miniature statue in coal
blood trees
shake nervous leaves from their bones,
falling like bullets
shaped as acorns into streams.
The only requiem I see these days
are the silver and blue plaques
etched into the centre of park benches,
no place of birth or worship -
wasteland in camera and scarlet ruin.  

​


Modern Happiness Was Never
Supposed to be an Algorithm

Under the mask lamp posts in black
camera stands eyes powering you to believe in everything
they never planned.

Similarity makes a city EASY to ply,
sugar laced exterior
it’s guts and voice a textual clone;   

When culture saturates repeating
stars on a moving racetrack - we are transfixed by our handheld squares
a prisoner to our own made – up popularity.

Eventually you’ll see
the full print of the human condition
where happiness has always been kept as a flux of oxygen;

A ceramic sky of blue with a vista of two million tears
falling beside the whispering moths of wild and dangerous nature,
we know now that modern happiness was never supposed to be an algorithm

​

Bio: Poems have appeared in Harbinger Asylum, Anti-Heroin Chic, Osiris, The Journal, Into the Void, Ink, Sweat, and Tears, Carillon, Anapest Journal, Algebra of Owls, Winner of the Erbacce Prize for Poetry in 2015 and Winner of the Into the Void Poetry Prize in 2016. Matt has a new collection of poems being published by New York Publishing House http://www.claresongbirdspub.com called ' One Million Tiny Cuts' now taking pre-orders.

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