PHILLIP MATTHEW ROBERTS

PHILLIP

MATTHEW ROBERTS

HEAD LIKE A CAMERA

Field notes for tentative cinema

(Various sets and locations

scenes: 1-3)

Roam beneath desolate night…

Abandoned ruins and bombed edifices

behind fallout shelter walls

dimly moonlit

enough to read

the marred profanity

and failed political bullshit.

No such thing as a last war.

(Various sets and locations

scenes: 4-7)

Behave as if a disembodied pronoun

scanning beauty and the grotesque.

Carry no official credentials

except one bold carte blanche

empowered as spilled virility.

A noire passerby

crossing charred bridges

beside silhouette clock towers

whose mourned hours

are chimed

arbitrarily as wind

swept ashes.

Boundaries of the loose holstered

patrolling midnight countries

after the sky was corrupted,

an azure deity profaned

until it resembles sludge.

(Various sets and locations

scenes: 8-10)

Nearer vivid imagination

than fading remembrances.

Everyone of significance:

the gowned wife and family

all relics dislodged

in dregs and dirges.

How hollow the past tense

echoing lonesome threnodies.

(Various sets and locations

scenes: 11-14)

Frantic laughter chases after lightening

like epiphanies descended.

Ensue songs for the trespasser…

A lone wandering departure

toward shadow limned mountains

(neither real nor dreamt) draped

by iodous twilight.

Dumb slumberous body

burdened with a symbol laden mind,

a camel through the needle's eye

risking visual cliches

for revelations inside

the labyrinth.

(Various sets and locations

scenes: 15-17)

Penthouse dwelling of the nameless elite

ensconced in leather bound libraries.

Goethe hung regally from oak walls

garbed in pale ripples of flowing white

pristine as a gentleman's promise

juxtaposed by long tracking shot streets

where smudge-faced budding urchins

learn and embrace thieving traditions

among the marginalized vanquished

and sullen impoverished…

Class distinction is one colossal fence

maintained at all costs

in every century.

JOURNEY BETWEEN POINT A AND B

Implores in a manner inexplicable,

away from daily commerce and normalcy

toward honest confusion whose generosity

brings me back to the words.

Unlikely stones made into palaces

for my weary unrest; mausoleums

constructed from slumber

and the future.

Sculpt absences with them the way

star lanterns kindle incompleteness

--all those vast betweens

reduced to simple prepositions.

Objectivity swathed in connotation,

enticed deeply inside her arabesque

until reality softens

into hushes

of afterthought.

The cities that exist no longer

and each person has returned

to their real or abstract nouns.

Unuttered sounds preserved

in these myriad emblems,

silently the baroque hours

embroidered by mystery.

S&5

: a synopsis intimating the threnodic

removal of "sin" (or what's merely human)

from the senses at theorized thresholds

Accompanied by familiar lonesomeness

who wearily travels at my thorn pierced side,

a faceless companion voicing monologues macabre

about invitations into the unremittent

black intuited from birth

and its unknown antithesis.

Dark bloom demarcated by delicate silhouettes

opened up to the pale pated gibbous moon

more steadfast than all loves mimicked

by ceaseless reiterations

echoing the vacant

human condition

Those secret insecurities locked inside

your vanity should tremble in rightful

awe at the everywhere unnameable

from Riemann's ethereal hypothesis

or Boltzmann's definitive constant

buttressing those contiguous borders

along one's imprisoned mind

where knowledge ceases.

Count the atoms in a single star

and witness my submissive faith condense

into a radius defining the needle's infinite eye

where Schwarzschild's equations are realized,

found in the boundless cosmic deep.

Hear the final drums beat

while they throb on fire;

bells ever diminished fainter

in the now forgotten past

that never existed.

Would tell you I am departing

but I've already leapt

into the sublime afar,

veiled behind a covenant

your monotonous abandonment

cannot recapitulate.

PHILLIP

MATTHEW ROBERTS