Matt's Poetry
**all poetry copyright Matt Lott**
My Heart: My Captor
The Choosing Of One
Ode To My Unborn Child
The Last Rose
Untitled-3
The Call Of the Ocean
Forever, Rose
American Tragedy
Writer's Block
Untitled-1
31 Flavors
The Stars Know
Loneliness
The Only Way
The Kiss
What Matters Most
The Battle For Color
*I Want Feedback*
My Heart: My Captor
Many times before, I thought I was in love,
Only to find out I didn’t know what it was.
Caught up in this faux love, I would lose myself.
My lips and intentions were on the same street,
But time would soon make a liar of me.
Never do I intend to harm such a delicate organ as her heart,
Though it happens every time.
My heart makes my tongue and lips instruments
Of destruction by filling them with words of love.
She hears these words...and believes them.
I, too, believe them.
My eyes and ears are henchmen of my heart,
Noticing the glowing features of another girl.
Bringing my heart’s attention to her,
Only to crush the feelings for the other girl beneath this
New, beautiful, faux love.
If I could escape it’s dominating captivity,
I would rip it from my chest and throw it as far away as possible.
I am its slave though,
And I am powerless to do anything about it.
Matt Lott – 7/6/99
The Choosing of One
This burden on my heart,
It feels like 100 pounds tugging at my soul.
Confusion sets the night ablaze.
I can’t sleep.
I see her when I close my eyes.
Her tears are collecting in a pool at my feet.
Why have I hurt her?
Why have I hurt myself?
My vision is blurred by obscure beauty
in the corner of my eye.
200 pounds weigh down my
heart with no hope for release.
I don’t want what I can have so easily.
I wont give up what can never be true.
It is… only in my dreams.
It will be… someday in my past.
I can’t feel my own emotions any longer.
I feel her emotions.
I offer my heart as simply as a Valentine’s rose.
Tears begin to pool at her feet.
Not hers,
Mine.
I don’t cry for her.
My weeping is for the other,
The one left alone.
Matt Lott – 1/5/99
Ode to My Unborn Child
O, how the cold air sends a shiver through me when I think of you.
Unborn, yet a vivid image in my mind still.
At the witching hour of the blackest night,
Your screams flood my head with thoughts of your conception.
Amid a dimly lit, but not quite romantic room you came.
Being only children ourselves, we had no idea
What mind-shattering torment we were bringing upon ourselves.
Another piercing scream brings my focus to changing
The diaper I had changed three hours earlier.
We ask ourselves how we could have been so naive
To not see what the future held for us.
This short pleasure of the flesh has rendered us helpless
To the unending torture of raising a child prematurely.
As soon as that night’s ruse is over, we return to the
Bed and stare blindly at the ceiling.
We have long since lost the ability to sleep.
Months pass before we realize that this torment is voluntary.
We are molded into beings with thoughts like no others:
Parents.
Can we really love this thing that has caused us so much anguish?
I would rather not ponder the idea right now.
The air is cold, and you are still unborn.
Matt Lott – 7/7/99
The Last Rose
The last rose on the earth died yesternight,
And I with it.
As it took its last breath and crashed to the ground at my feet,
My soul abandoned my body and went flying off into the field.
Darting between the weeds and broken trees
It searched for a common soul.
The hunt was a ruse of indignity, though.
The last of the earth’s greatest species both died
In one blinding moment.
There is nowhere else to go but down.
Matt Lott – 9/27/99
Untitled-3
I wish I could tell you the way you make me feel.
It would make me so happy to tell you how I feel.
But I cant… not now.
When the time is right and I have the courage,
I will.
For now, this babbling prose is my only keepsake for you.
I leap for the chance to be with you.
I wish I didn’t have to keep these emotions inside.
My heart is beating faster than I could possibly write this down,
Yet every pulse brings more emotion.
My chest swells to it’s bursting point every night thinking of you.
It is exploded by the jagged edge of the chain that is holding me back.
My body will not cheat,
But my heart and mind have long been sinners.
I cannot voice my anguish until I break the chain.
If I do break loose,
Can I feel certain you will feel the same?
So many reasons why I shouldn’t.
So many reasons why I should.
Matt Lott – 7/14/99
The Stranger
Stranger than the homeless man begging in the alleyway
Is the stranger inside me.
I know the emotions of others more than I know my own.
I love others more than I love myself.
I don’t even know myself.
In fact, I love myself just as much as that same homeless man.
My heart is that man:
Drifting from body to body,
Never knowing when it’s next meal will come,
Or if it will live to see another day.
The icy grip of disease is behind every dark corner
Waiting to rip it apart.
If that happens, it won’t matter though.
My homeless heart cannot be killed…
Again.
Matt Lott -10/26/99
The Call Of the Ocean
I heard the call of the ocean.
And looking on so dire,
Saw the lulling motion,
That set the world on fire.
I answered rather slowly,
As though it wouldn’t hear.
I know now I should go be
Where there are no tears.
Deep within the ocean,
All the world so blue,
All my life’s devotion,
I give it all to you.
I walk into the water,
Cleansing all my sin.
Ignoring all the clatter.
Ignoring all the din.
I know you’re on the surface,
Looking there for me.
I see you there in your grace,
As I’m watching from the sea.
I heard the call of your voice,
It’s sound so very true.
I’d never had so hard a choice
As the one I made for you.
The ocean will be there another day.
For you, I cannot wait.
God has come and had his say,
Prepared my heart’s dear state.
You pulled me from the azure deep,
To each breath I was clinging.
Clutching on, my tears to keep,
I heard you gently singing.
There is nothing that I wouldn’t do,
No change for the weather.
I can’t live my life without you,
God keep us together.
Matt Lott – 2/17/99
Forever, Rose
Why are you still here rose?
Long ago you should have faded.
Held up for so long aided by a wire,
Outliving all the others.
You mock me with your beauty.
Your head hung low as if to bring up mine.
I thought I had let go long before…
Let go of what you represent.
The thorns that would prick my fingers as I
Held you even softly are now gone.
The leaves which tried so painstakingly to steal your
Attention have wilted and fallen away.
You are hard and cold, but standing tall.
Nothing but the core left to others,
But I see your beauty.
The glory I know of your presence comes from
Where and why you came to me.
Thankyou, rose.
Now I understand why you have stood beside
Me all this time.
You stood for every bit of love within my heart.
Each time my heart was broken,
A piece of you withered as well.
We are both stronger now through maturity.
Matt Lott – 7/8/99
American Tragedy
Thoughts of you cut like a knife.
Slicing at my throat
Heartily trying, but unable to speak your name.
Everything you are hurts what I am.
I must be real with you.
You see through the rest of us.
Hardened upon the thought of being hurt again
If you will believe it,
I can promise I wont hurt you.
(even though your presence in my life right now is tragic)
I am caught between that which is familiar
And the dessert my body craves.
You are still cutting at me, but somehow
The pain is going away.
It is going away with thoughts of holding back
When my heart is telling me to go forward with
Everything I have.
If I become numb, I will feel neither pain nor pleasure.
Turn the pain into pleasure, there’s the key.
Forget the restrictions you’re your mind has placed
On your heart and follow me.
Together we will find our way back to happiness.
Matt Lott – 7/15/99
Writer’s Block
Did I really throw away my inspiration?
Was it truly her what made my pen move?
I know I can do it on my own.
The anguish of locked away emotion will flow again.
How like waters behind a dam has it milled about
In my mind for so long.
NO MORE!
My mind is now free to express itself however it chooses.
My writer’s block is gone.
She wasn’t my inspiration…
She just locked it up.
Ha! I have found the key.
Matt Lott – 7/6/99
Untitled-1
I hold a pen in my hand because I am writing a poem.
As I stare at the blank paper before me,
Unconscious words begin to flow from the inkwell.
The words aren’t living,
But they feel every emotion I do.
They pass along the page like days in a week.
Each space between the words a break in the day.
Thoughts and emotions fill the gaps in both.
Years pass between each letter of every word.
I end the sentence with a different meaning than when
It was born of my mind.
You read over my work and tell me how you love it,
And thought the reason I write is flawed,
I am satisfied.
Matt Lott – 2/4/99
31 Flavors
How many flavors make up the
whole of your existence?
If you could count them all and mix them together,
You have more time on your hands than I.
I left my existence at work I think…
At least I hope so.
I don’t know how I will determine
Which flavor is mine.
31 of them belong to Baskin Robbins…
The others must be mine.
Except of course, one sample of Cookies and Cream,
Which is Conner’s.
Matt Lott – May 1999
The Stars Know
I will never let go… I promise.
Judgment is near, and you I cannot lose.
Our days have been greener than the sky,
Bluer than the grass.
Yet somehow my mind is on a distant gray moon.
A lunar tide carries me farther away than you ever could.
My body remains… lifelessly still,
As my soul wanders the endless black universe.
Questioning the stars for answers beyond all reason.
It will never be satisfied with their answers,
But will never cease in its inquisition.
Though I am really no longer here,
I will never let you go… I promise.
I lost you once before, and even the stars see no reason
We should ever be apart again.
Matt Lott – 12/14/99
Loneliness
Loneliness swallowed me whole.
Not even a soul to keep my body company.
A flower that blooms on a high mountaintop
At least has the sun shining near its face.
A fish in the deepest crevice of the ocean
At least has the water coursing through its gills.
I wander through this world in emptiness.
Neither the sunshine nor the water keeps me alive.
No warmth consumes my lifeless body.
No peace consumes my bodiless life.
Matt Lott – 1/20/00
The Only Way
Dull is the day spent under a skinny shade tree.
The spirit has little to say then.
Fancy the song of a whippoorwill
And the tongue rides on the wind.
Slipping through the crevices of the day,
Like a worm slinking through a rotted apple.
More dull is the day spent under the large oak
Alive with masses of babbling birds.
The more they attempt conversation,
The more bitter loneliness consumes me.
A void-like cold attacks the tips of my toes.
Black gangrenous tissue spreads quickly up my to chest.
My heart stops the disease, but only momentarily.
Noticing the rotting flesh, the flock moves in.
Pecking and tearing at my body until nothing remains
But silent pain.
Neither love, friendship, or a stranger's sympathy can quench
The blinding pain.
Fire is the only way.
The eternal flame that quenches one pain with another.
Matt Lott - 2/7/00
The Kiss
Adding udder absolution to the night,
A silent kiss pierces the blackness.
Logic here, neither before nor now.
Peace, still, calm... only ebbs the surface.
Tiny eddies ripple and sail along the rose-
river of liquid love that is my heart.
A thief you could never be,
for giving my heart to you was the truest act
in the play that is my life.
Matt Lott - 3/3/00
What Matters Most
Nothing has mattered since her.
Trees have lost their leaves
Birds have gone and come again
Warmth turned to coldness and back
But nothing has mattered since her.
Wars raged violently beneath me
The world's leaders were changed
Suddenly there was peace again
But still nothing has mattered since her.
Winter gave way to spring
Cupid tried out his aim on me
Relationships ended before they'd begun
But even still, nothing has mattered since her.
Unbeknownst to me, magic filled the air.
A new fish came to the pond.
A fish unlike any of the others.
Skeptically unbelieving, I paid little attention.
This fish had a bite, however,
And it bit me hard.
Realization came by way of a single tear.
Something mattered.
Not taking her place, but mattered just the same.
Let the world rejoice inside me.
Something else matters,
And believe me, it is she.
Matt Lott - 3/8/00
The Battle For Color
An entire culture of colorful people
Fallen by the wayside.
Plunged into darkness,
Left alone by the light of the sign.
The sign showers us with light,
Falsified through and through.
More like an eerie glow against a
Black palette.
The symbols on the sign are why we
Live this way.
A force supposed to protect and serve us
Sent us here.
Blindly they serve the sign and forget about
The life beyond it.
We, the colorful people, are the enemy.
Vagabonds, roaming the planet questioning everything.
Forced into darkness, which we constantly battle.
Adding color to the surface, lightening the
Void of color within.
Forever, we, with others who pretend to be like us
Will battle against the sign and the force.
Huddled against the limits of emptiness
Basking in the light of the sign.
Matt Lott – 4/15/00
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