Trauma: Poems and Songs of a failed life

Version 1 of my new book release is out. When the hard cover copy comes out, about 200 more pages are going to be added to the poetry book.

Songs and Poems of a Failed Life
A Book by Matthew P. Haubert

This is not a book about recovery. This is not a redemption story. This is evidence—left behind by someone who survived psychiatric wards, county jails, addiction, and the slow collapse of a life built on lies we tell ourselves about love.

Songs and Poems of a Failed Life collects poetry, song lyrics, and journal entries written in the margins of institutional forms, on the backs of medication schedules, and in the brutal clarity that comes at 3 AM when you’re too medicated to sleep and too awake to forget. These pieces span years of incarceration, hospitalization, and the kind of freedom that feels more like falling than flying.

Matthew P. Haubert writes in the tradition of the confessional poets—Sylvia Plath’s unflinching self-exposure, Anne Sexton’s refusal to make suffering beautiful, Allen Ginsberg’s howling repetition. But he brings something uniquely his own: the clinical precision of someone who knows the names of every drug that failed to save him, the working-class realism of Ohio rust belt decay, and the dark humor of watching yourself burn while taking notes.

This is folk music for the institutionalized. Leonard Cohen if he’d been locked up. Elliott Smith with a criminal record. Punk poetry that knows the difference between Ativan and Klonopin and uses both as metaphors for numbness.

You’ll find love letters written from jail cells, philosophical arguments with God conducted through clenched teeth, memories that refuse to stay in the past, and a running documentary of what happens when systems designed to help you decide you’re easier to warehouse than heal.

The voice in these pages is immediate, surgical, musical, and unforgiving. It doesn’t ask for sympathy. It doesn’t perform wellness. It simply refuses to lie about what it’s like to be thirty-five and sixty-eight at the same time, to love people you’ve hurt, to want peace while making noise, to keep writing even when the embers have burned out.

This is confessional brutality.
This is repetition as survival.
This is what it sounds like when someone stops apologizing for being broken.

Songs and Poems of a Failed Life is for anyone who’s ever felt trapped inside their own architecture, who knows that recovery isn’t linear, that trauma doesn’t make you poetic—but sometimes poetry is the only way to prove you’re still breathing.

Matthew P. Haubert writes like he’s leaving evidence. Because he is.