Inner Planets: 50 Poems

By Matthew Howard

Presenting fifty original free-verse poems in an ebook companion to the audiobook Inner Planets, featuring a selection of works from in Animal Inside You, Anything Sounds Like a Symphony, and Never See the Night, plus two previously uncollected poems. From the creator of The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Matthew Howard
• Release date: May 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005403218

Matthew Howard

Matthew is a mammalian vertebrate who occupies spacetime, where he possesses mass and generates electromagnetic fields. He absorbs and reflects photons, and is currently recycling his own body weight in adenosine triphosphate every day.

Book preview

insect

for 80 million years she crawled

flightless as her arthropod ancestors

she grew wings in the devonian period

and flew away faster than six legs ever carried her

no flowers bloomed or scented her flight

no brutes with torches or electric moons

she flew in a night without fire and she dreamed

remember her under your porch lights

in your desolate parking lots at 3 a.m.

in your isolated rooms where sunlight

never penetrates

remember her millennia of yearning

for a place to swarm and burn completely

and in that brief flash before dying

tell an ancient story written with buzzing wings

outlined with keratinous hairs

segmented like carapaces into paragraphs

stories you could never understand

until you too had lived in darkness

drone

near the end

you chose the monotone

you had your fill

of chord progressions

bouncing like billie

children playing in the grass

chasing soap bubbles

until they burst

all you wanted

was a steady drone

a placid ostinato

oscillating in the background

like hummingbird wings

or a rothko canvas

consuming your vision

with one fundamental color

kalaratri

time’s endless night

destroys all those she makes

her acolytes

we build honeycombs in carrion

not even ravens will scavenge

we sleep in cities where birds refuse to roost

back alleys where the concrete wind

blows one implacable song

then collapses

in refuse we find refuge

what was cast off we repurpose

to make it new

my sweet everything

this continent belongs to you

by virtue of your villainy

you own it because it cannot escape you

nor restrain you

your power here is absolute

the essence of impermanence and solitude

embracing all and drawing them

to your breast

suckle your disciple

so i might outlive