Matt Sadler Commerce, MI
Matt Sadler is originally from Highland MI and currently resides in the Detroit area. His work has been published in Poetry East, Passages North, Versel, Red Ink and other literary magazines and newspapers.
Billy Collins’ comments:
“Emerson could have been thinking about this poet when he compared writing poetry to ice-skating because you are often taken to places you didn’t exactly intend to go. These poems glide from one thing-time-place to another driven only by the sheer trust this poet has in his or her imaginative process.”
To see a person’s legs detach and run off in opposite directions
would be funny, right?
I thought so, too. Is the surreal, then,
just another version of this comedy?
What if my brother calls me puddle as a joke? (He does).
Should I rip all the mirrors off his Suburu?
Does he even have a Suburu?
This condition, this anti-reality, is becoming
the air
around me, is filling the domed hat our planet wears.
And there are fewer and fewer geeky, bespectacled logic birds
clotting the
skies each year.
How to explain their decline? Cranial warming? A hole
in the skull cap? Matt, the world is too serious for all this.
But what else can I do? I’ve heard
that emperors used to pay their underlings handsomely
just to remind them they were mortal, not god. Here
all the mortals have shotguns and fuzzy orange hunting hats,
and my birds drop like the stems of a firework
after a bright round explosion. Logic escapes me
But the semblance of logic remains, the structure,
the bare holy studs of it. A still goes perfectly
with B. Then ubiquitously follows If.
It’s no use. I can walk through walls, but transparency
is too vast a realm
If the quadratic formula sprouts wings,
then it will fly off this rock and leave us alone.
If you see three tomatoes unripening on my kitchen windowsill,
then come into my house, fill it with sadness,
empty your windsock so my kite can rise.
All useless. No sense to it. I’ve broken
the key off inside the lock.
With any luck
I can find someone to praise me like a king
for minimum wage.