By Alliance Communications Coordinator Amy Durr
This week we’re featuring the poem All’ve It by Matt Moberg, an artist and poet living and working in Minneapolis.
After a nighttime visit to the ER following years of addiction, Moberg went to see a therapist:
“To my surprise, she asked me if there was a hobby that I knew I wasn’t very good at. The list was admittedly long for me to pick from, but I started talking about drawing right away. I told her how ever since I was a kid, my hands have shook with tremors which always talked me out of even trying to take on the craft,” Moberg told CanvasRebel.
“‘Well that’s what you need to do then,’ she said. ‘You need to go do something that will slow you down without any kind of pressure to produce.‘”
Drawing became a sacred act for Moberg, his “daily devotional”:
“As I’ve taken on the heavy healing that comes with that path [of becoming sober], art has been this medicinal gift that has both helped my mind slow down and kept the bottle down. In many ways, art has saved my life. I’m grateful for that…”
As Moberg puts it on his website: art became “a means of staying alive,” a way to channel his emotions and cope with his challenges. His pieces — bold brushstrokes, sharp contrasts, powerful imagery — explore the pain of addiction and the joy of rediscovering himself in sobriety.
A Long Poem for an Unbearably Tender Life
In addition to his wonderful drawings and paintings, Matt expresses his pain and joy through poetry. The vulnerability so evident in his visual art is heart-wrenchingly present in his words as well, but it’s tempered by a wide-eyed awe for even the most mundane gifts life hands us.
This is a longer poem than we usually feature, and the length is the point: it needs room to move from a trash bag and a divorce to the moon “working nights like a single mother with no applause” without losing the thread.
All’ve It by Matt Moberg
I think every human being eventually has a moment where they are standing outside in sweatpants that have lost the will to be pants, holding a trash bag, a divorce, a parking ticket, or some other receipt from the universe that says, “surprise, this too is part of it.” And then the sky bruises purple. And the air touches your face like it knows your whole story. And suddenly you realize: all the real is actually unreal. The dirt. The breath. The weird little bones in your hands. The fact that we are here, on a floating rock with pollen counts, paying bills, missing dead people, loving living people who say “leaving now” while still fully naked and looking for socks. And still, the moon clocks in. No applause. No benefits. No note from management saying, “Great work being ancient and luminous again.” Just the moon, working nights like a single mother with no applause, packing silver lunches for every dark thing that still has to rise. Tell me that isn’t holy. Tell me there is a better word than sacred for the way light keeps returning with no guarantee we will actually stop and take note. I know people who believe in therapy, probiotics, tarot, twelve-step meetings, manifestation journals, and waiting exactly eleven minutes before texting back so they do not appear emotionally available, even though their whole nervous system is standing in the driveway holding flowers. And underneath all of it, every ritual, every doctrine, every smoothie with chia seeds, the prayer is the same: Please let me be loved. Please let me be forgiven. Please let this strange little life mean something before my lower back submits its formal resignation. What is going on? For real tho—What is this place? This unbearable tenderness of being alive long enough to watch steam lift from coffee in winter like a soul practicing leaving. To see your friend laugh so hard they slap the table as if joy is a mosquito they are trying to kill. To hear a child say “pisghetti” and, for one shining second, realize language has finally been improved. I know I already noted this in the first piece, but the older I get, the less use I have for certainty. Certainty has never made me pull over because the sunset looked like God dropped a jar of peach jam across the whole midwestern sky and decided to be lazy and not clean up. Certainty has never made me gasp at rain on hot pavement. Certainty has never found me in the cereal aisle, holding Captain Crunch, suddenly remembering that everyone I have ever loved was made from stardust, hunger, and a series of decisions we probably should have slept on. No. It has always been awe. Awe was the first church. Before steeples. Before committees. Before men got involved and started making rules about skirts. Awe was there with its wild hair and muddy feet, saying: Look. Look again. Look until looking becomes love. Awe, and soup. Awe, and someone rubbing your back when you are sick. Awe, and old couples at Target arguing gently about avocados, as if marriage is not one vow but ten thousand errands performed beside the person who knows exactly how you like the cart pushed. Maybe gratitude was never meant to sound elegant. Maybe gratitude sounds like: “Damn. That woodpecker is trying to beat that tree from itself.” Maybe gratitude sounds like: “Thank you, body, for continuing to drag me through this world despite the many slim jims I have done to you at gas stations.” Maybe gratitude sounds like: “Thank you to the dogs who lose their entire minds when we come home as if we have returned from war and not Walgreens.” For me, that might be my gospel. That joy that does not wait for us to be impressive but only needs us to come through the door. Because the truth is, this life is devastating. And ridiculous. One minute you are 22 and invincible, driving too fast, eating gas station nachos with the confidence of a Greek god. The next minute you are googling, “Can sneezing cause a hamstring injury?” and the answer is, apparently, “Welcome to the second half of your life.” But even now— even tired, even grieving, even emotionally held together by iced coffee, playlists, and one very specific wolves hoodie— we keep finding reasons to stay soft. We plant tomatoes even though grief is real. We bake bread even though the news is on fire. We send photos of the sky to people we love with captions like, “LOOK,” as if beauty is an emergency and we are all volunteer firefighters. We keep saying, “You have to see this,” because wonder is the oldest form of resurrection. So here’s to the believers and the atheists and the agnostics and the people whose entire theology is just trying not to cry in the DMV line. Here’s to the people clinging to faith. Here’s to the people clinging to Xanax and oat milk and the one group chat where nobody pretends to be okay. Here’s to the tender-hearted weirdos. The accidental mystics. The ones who can contemplate mortality for six straight hours and then become emotionally attached to a perfect peach. The ones who know despair has a mouth, but so does laughter. May we never stop being drop-kicked by beauty in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. May we never become so polished that we forget how to stand in the Starbucks line of existence with our dumb, gorgeous hearts open, feeling the enormity of it all rattle around in our bones like thunder looking for somewhere to laugh. And may we remember: whatever else this is, whatever mess, whatever miracle, whatever cosmic group project no one was prepped for— all’ve it is astonishing. that we are here. that we have loved enough to be ruined. that the moon keeps showing up. that bread exists. So pass it on. Tear off a piece with your bare hands. Take it in as you take it down. And then go outside and look at that moon.