My poetry is written in the dark.
A promised secrecy — that
is my antidote to persisted remembrance,
an echolalia of incomplete things.
I give myself out. In my moment
of vulnerability, the lonely hour,
I think I see before me a wallpaper
of a thousand thundering eyes,
boring bullet-holes into my sternum.
But they will find no heart, for I have already
laid it out. I have strength left only
to wave away the ravening crows.
My altar, my sacrifice, is private.
Only I may interpret the visceral daub
that history has so kindly lent me.
Matthew Lee is a writer living with cancer in Melbourne, Australia. His work can be found or is forthcoming in Meniscus Literary Journal, North of Oxford Journal, and Neologism Poetry Journal, among others.
Academy of the Heart And Mind 