Poems by Matthew Geden
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Rousseau's Jungle
   
Tonight the air is tropical, pregnant
with rain, cascades of colour fall
into your lap as you sit beneath
the collapsed rose, pendulous figs sway
to some distant rhythm, someone sings
your name and dinosaurs break from
the undergrowth running blindly to extinction.
I think of him living in his cut-up
world where the familiar is made
strange, a cocktail of drugs swallowed
with tea and toast. I remember the words
we shared, the dark recognition that burns
holes in the heart and the gradual
sinking towards the earth. If you listen
carefully you can hear the priest, he 
hums softly to himself in another room,
prepares himself for tomorrow's mass.
 


Brazil
 
Aimless yellow clouds drift into
the living-room punctuating conversation,
weather-fronts push in from the kitchen
and I stare into the unblinking eye
of a toucan. I live with strangeness,
an uneasy pact with unfamiliarity
which curls like a blood-red snake
through the trees. There are terrific
thunder-storms in the static afternoons
and sometimes a witch-like woman
comes to call, defining me with her
huge blue eyes. At night occasional
candles burn on the beach and
the sea creeps in across the sand.
Tomorrow I'll go back to the Amazon,
I don't know if I'll ever go home.
 

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Matthew Geden was born in the English Midlands, moving to Ireland in 1990. His most recent collection is The Place Inside published by Dedalus Press in 2012.

Weblink:

http://dedaluspress.com/authors/geden-matthew/