The most beautiful sound of all
might’ve been
“Freeman, your charges have been dropped.”
And then that morning light
at the Metrolink
when you had to jump the train
because you didn’t have the money for a ticket.
It hurt, but just a little.
So say your piece. Your aunt
gave you a few bucks later
to trim her rose bushes.
I just literally had to receive some fierce knocks.
I’m still not clear on why that was the case.
The worst was down in Union, Missouri,
suffering a great number of blows
from a bunch of farm boys,
losing consciousness and ending up
on the garage floor of some random family
and waking to the sound
of sirens in the distance.
Around here mere metaphor
doesn’t land a punch.
Somehow I Lived to See
I was telling my sister
about this cool tough older guy
I always see smoking on the patio
who carries this antiquated gunpowder pistol
and how he got super drunk
and shot himself in the ass
a couple of days after drawing down
on the homeless kid for no real reason
and she was like, “That’s gold, that’s gold.”
You see, living fully
inside the symbolic
doesn’t necessarily have anything to do
with your name,
and certainly has nothing to do
with your physical body,
only the significant concurrence and light
of the beautiful things you come across.
Matthew Freeman just published his seventh collection of poems,I Think I'd Rather Roar (Cerasus Poetry). A chapbook, Exile, was published by 2River. Freeman holds an MFA from the University of Missouri—Saint Louis.