PHILLIP
MATTHEW ROBERTS
Selected entries from a street
journal
kept by an anonymous vagrant
discovered
among refuse and abandoned drug
paraphernalia
when I lived through a prolonged
delusional
state among recently released
criminals
and barefoot saints as a homeless
man in an ongoing, extemporaneous
work of fiction while following
my fugue-state doppelgänger
Admittedly I'm apathetic…
Growling unkempt canine
ferocity
chanting madman make-believe
or seething voodoo curses
at well attired, glib faced
passersby
who ignore us--we of the ill
street ilk
--the mentally unstable… the
wrathful
remains wraith-made from
childhoods
mourned when demised our
tiny innocence
consumed: sweet meat beaded
sweat undressed
--small pastry delicacies
sucked and swined
our truffle-glut snouted
bare rump fundaments
worshiped beneath Satanic
and Christian
roofs alike with
commensurate delight
via every secret means in
beds and sheds
after the lights went out
and now as men
who've inherited meaningless
pity
and malignant
misinterpretations
of religion and well
intended promises
worth less than the vile
spit
that lubricates their lies
we attend our own services,
a communion of booze and
drugs
your status quo despises.
__
A daily ruse for daily
bread…
Standing in gruff-grumble
stench lines
among the unwashed
downtrodden
beneath the rigid
spire-shadows
at the Third Street church
begging for our curmudgeon's
meal
made from eleemosynary
crusts
of hard bread three days old
dipped in hot-broth soup
like the calloused words
savored in my acerbic mouth
contemptible toward all
injustices
old as mankind's sentience.
__
Utopias no longer merely
dreamt
when the fresh needle stings
the vein
with blossom songs red as
bouquets
echoed with blood-rhyme
symmetry
inside Hypnos' hypodermic…
Secret landscapes hung
in the afar dream horizons
--tapestries made with
synesthesia
and fresh plucked poppies
brighter than Dorthy Gale's
Technicolor ruby slippers…
__
The nuns who fondly quote
Assisi
ogled while in my rarely
sober throes
I marvel at the warmth
untouched
beneath their halloween
habits--
imagined sacrifices ancient
on hewn, blood-stained
stones
with bleating lambs or
screaming virgins
I must acknowledge as
vengeance
wished--spawned from my own
often mourned
"unknown soldier"
blood-spilled battlefield
rebellious
youth sacrificed by my well
spoken,
college educated oppressors.
__
As a boy I watched fire
drip gem-bright from
Father's eyes
after unthreading his hot
entrails
into a feces-foul slop pile
after he supped for the last
time
on my submissive innocence…
Carried mother's cover-up
reticence
back into the blackest
silence
where birth and death
commingle--
notes upon staves for a
requiem
yet played among apathetic
bystanders
one refers to as the masses.
__
Delusional and dangerous at
times
the raw, mercurial potency
of my mind
turns away from your
rationale discourse,
polite table manners and
silly prayers
made with the aplomb of
political speeches
until my stoned eyes find
the stars
once more to enclose my
sorrow
ecce homo until the
ecumenical
hush unheard among the
faithless
returns for my grateful
slumber eternal.
__
Too boyishly sensitive for
the world
I am bequeathed to these
scribbled lines
(that account for my earthly
trespass
among those who shunned
pariahs)
on scraps of paper worn as
mendicant
garbs torn and tatter-fetid,
the gauze wrapped
about my rose-wounds
unhealed as true stigmata.
Phillip Matthew Roberts
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