Name: The Cabernet Hours
Duration: P00H02M08S
Description: for Brian "Voice" Porter Hawkins

The Cabernet Hours

from Miracle Strip by Matt Layne

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for Brian "Voice" Porter Hawkins

lyrics

The Cabernet Hours

My friend is dead,
and I am without
words, so I seek poets
whose writing has carried
me through cabernet hours:
Cummings, Keats, and Clifton.
I read Doty, Porter, and Jones
but find no relief, no magic bullet
for the inevitable punctuation
at the end of every damn sentence.

Death baffles me.
How are you here, now,
Voice-reading this,
and then you are gone?
How can I hold your words
in my hand, but they silver slip
like minnows through my fingers?
How can you write in one moment
but be gone before the final line?

Constants blink out with a single keystroke,
and we are left with the pulsing cursor of memory.

This is not a poem for the dead.
The ears which hear are here.
The eyes which read are reading now.
The hearts who remember are now remembering.

My living friends,
write your truth in stone,
spit your words with fire
until your last breath is a memory of smoke.
Call out your God in fevered prayer,
shape-note drone your words like summer bees,
let the sound of your voice reverberate,
so we hang upon your last syllable
as your parents hung upon your first cry.
Sing, and don’t stop singing,
for this night is darker than wine,
and there is no comfort
at the end of this sentence.

credits

from Miracle Strip, released August 31, 2022

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about

Matt Layne Birmingham, Alabama

Poet, librarian, raconteur; Matt Layne has been poking hornet's nests and looking under rocks since he was knee-high to a peanut peg.
I reckon you oughta check him out.