Matthew Freeman Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, July 27

Matthew Freeman will be a featured reader at Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, July 27.

Also featured will be Jennifer Goldring and Marisol Ramirez.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m.; admission is free.

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Matthew Freeman woke up and found he was falling when as a teenager his football coach got him into Dylan Thomas and a dear girl friend introduced him to the romantics. So began a wild journey which would leave him expelled from school and committed to an asylum, and diagnosed with schizophrenia. After bouncing in and out of hospitals and drunk tanks he finally began his recovery. He has had four books published and has graduated from Saint Louis University, where he was awarded the Montesi prize, and is now an MFA student at the University of Missouri St. Louis, where he was awarded the Graduate Prize in poetry.

Finally I admit It: Yes, I Am a Bum 

Clear and terror filled my days I
walked as a living affront to realities
not bound,
a thousand miles from my home,
my cap pulled down over my eyes, 

watching the freight trains roll by.
(when you were sitting on the porch
you could vaguely hear your
father finally cry
from the front room
and you felt like—you
didn’t know—maybe like you
were made out of glass
and could be broken
by a conductor’s baton)

And now I sit all day with the innocents,
smokinging a cheap cigar,
strumming on my gay guitar,
singing with Cisco and Sonny and Leadbelly too,
when THAT GUY comes in
wearing a disguise
and it is the PHONE AGAIN
but star 69 does not work,
the yellow birds gather round me,
I look toward the dumpster for redemption
and only beg the Lord
to cast me out amongst the poor. 

-- Matthew Freeman