WHEN I DREAM WELL
By David Matthews

When I Dream Well

Her head held as if she were posing
now for Renoir, yesterday Rodin,
her face I know
from when I dream well
chance encounters on grand boulevards
where peacocks admire themselves
in windows of shops
and brilliant reflecting pools
while memory fades into nostalgia
as what might be
is passed on
to what might have been
for us to lose
or love
in the passing on of what ever was.

Beautiful Soul

They say he walked into the room
as if from an unfinished book
by a nineteenth-century Russian
with a taste for roulette
and women with a past.

They say he was the kind
to let others think what they would
and do what they might with it.
If that came with a price,
he bore it well,
a kind of vengeance
exacted on a world
never so much hostile as indifferent.

How much of yourself
must you give away?
How much can you afford to owe?
Can anyone tell the worth
of a beautiful soul?

Does There Stand One?

does there stand  one
who in her pause
considering a photograph,
a temple on
a rocky hill, say, Greece,
contemplates an old film
by Bergman
a quest
for faith and love
through a silence
that speaks
with eloquence
and ruin

if there were such a one
her heart might beat
as this heart might,
her voice speak
with reticence
and grace
her eyes embrace
erotic mountains
and forge soliloquies
of fog

Blood in the Air

there is blood in the air
fever in the sky
rage runs wild
in rivers
and along boulevards
there is commotion
in my mind

the tombstone investor
is in on a  growth industry
more death than an inkwell
might hold and spill
out on this world
that reels out of control

so much of everything is loss
we need an abacus
of entropy —
to calculate the cost

I see people caught up
in all this confusion
and pain
I hear them say,
nothing is the same
I have to wonder
if it ever was

Work Week Eve

When Sunday night is reduced to no more
than Monday morning eve,
and the false hope of Friday night
exposed for the desperate gambit that it is,
I do not know quite what to say
or make of the man
who can eyeball the coming work week
without reaching for the revolver
or medication.
Meditation is not sufficient
to a task that screams
for electroshock.
Hook me up, mama,
Give me some juice.

About the Author:

david matthews

David Matthews is a native of the South Carolina Midlands, resident of Portland, Oregon, poet, runner, and unaffiliated intellectual. He draws on diverse traditions to fashion poems that at their best convey a sense of something akin to what the Romantics referred to as the sublime and the Surrealists termed the marvelous. “Matthews heaves his heart against the bulwarks, sets his siege engines of verse a-going into the fathomless ludicrous nonsensical void.”—Wade Dinius