PHILLIP MATTHEW ROBERTS

PHILLIP MATTHEW ROBERTS

1

Illegal film developed

badly in nocturnal emulsions

stained beneath umbrella shadows

with a bitter aftertaste

Sometimes I believe nothing remains

of myself for these famished pages.

Blankness a cannibal

who drapes voices over bones,

conceals blood behind syllables

saturated by past generations.

The first understood sound

a lonely echo lost as the context

in which it was spoken;

probably pain or ecstasy

when one is vociferous.

Am trying to plagiarize the future

with shards of broken mirrors

and their reflections

arranged into new countries

without flags or commerce;

continents where lions and lambs

share a fearful symmetry.

Inventing rituals for the unborn.

Crossing guards at every turn

who anticipated documented passports.

Wandering through a war not yet named.

Can no longer distinguish between fiction

or any other genre--every word

a meager replacement for

the inevitably forgotten.

Read somewhere the mentally ill

murder to prove they're real

--less frightening than those

who made the propaganda.

I witness Durkheim's anomie

parading through day lit streets

prosaically dressed and uninterested.

Apathy that will not speak up for itself,

the quintessence learned

by imitation.

Herds of the so called lesser animals

running steadfast toward extinction.

Hordes among those who name things

and laughably distinguish good from evil.

Every time I pass by those fancy homes

I imagine how I'd drink their households

into merciless ruin--massacres

against the sedate humdrum;

sans wig noblesse oblige

still donning affects

of effete acceptance

until currency is involved.

Age descends lightly as nightingales.

Death more like birds than angels

who lack talons

and avoid human stench.

Dreams where I defecate

in front of defaced iconography

--saints with eyeless faces

hung from blue winter evenings

where Dark Age beasts roam

and devour their own eroticism.

The bitter taste of lukewarm brine

swirled oceanic in my mouth distinct

as Mother's freshly fallen placenta

reminiscent of gnawed manna

spat at oblivious passersby

who do not hear the anathema

whispered softly from darkness.

__

2

__

Memes reduced to memos

regarding possible tomorrows

Hollowness garbed in voices

worn about the mouth--disguises

for every occasion and season

except from oneself despite

wielding chiseled themes

honed upon enduring canons

east and west;

writ across canvases

extravagant or cheap

as wine stained bar napkins.

Pale days blank as carte blanche.

Nights darker than spilled ink.

I costumed in borrowed pronouns,

pretend glimpses from another's eyes

lived briefly as imagination's

ethereal allowance portrayed

first in the heart's melodic cranium

beating its motley throng and ardent thrum,

casts waiting for the newly written.

Each masterful generation

and their literature imbued

with its own lingual panache,

acerbic critiques and

courageous evocations.

Hang unused words like abandoned suits

in omnibus closets dim and luminous

as everyday consciousness.

Uncertain questions unanswered

strewn into long crooked corridors

leading toward ubiquitous back stages

crowded with remnants

random as remembrance:

sets for the Magic Flute,

Kafka's queer entomology

and Macbeth's esoteric cauldron

stirred by weird sister prophecy.

Returned again as an echo to silence

patiently anticipating breaths

wreathed in fire.

__

3

__

A beggar's return to an endeavor

always ongoing, never completed

written between now and not now

Awaken hungry for expressions.

Drowsy eyed inventory:

bare room, undraped mattress

variously stained beneath

soft sodium pale bulbs--

hung miniature suns,

luminous embryos warmly ripened

from electric stems--a lone voice

addressing light and its antithesis.

Darkness but a meager

background or stage

bereft of players.

The windows an escape once

open only over fictional scenery

and no longer reveal

subtle hours or seasons:

exterior a meaningless term

--houses erected eyeless

seated blindly on cosine hills

like overgrown homunculi.

What isn't imaginary if

a gestalt consciousness exists?

Omniscience that has no exits

met already on the other side.

Soul is no less an idea

than roads are footsteps.

Travel without a passenger--

carrying omissions inside metaphors

idle upon moon eclipsed doldrums.

(Deducing Jupiter formed first

among the planets--colossal tawny god

migrating effortlessly

across a galactic nursery

barely one billion years old.)

Stories painted along cave walls

lit up by fire long before allegory.

Words posses a reliable persistence

I've learned to trust intimately

though they don't always resonate

the way self gets lost in mystery

--will gaze at my own reflection

until the stranger returns

to the common present.

Unknowns are my truest companions

steady as temperate metronomes

or the relentless muscled drum

beating rhythms in red temples.

(Logos imbrued with blood.)

Tear at jaundiced yellow pages

as though my own flesh.

Thought unleashed resembles silence

shaped into aesthetic contours

the way angels are limned

or the cosmos is boundless.

Abysses and ascensions--

spirals described by parabolas,

my life reduced to studious hyperbole.

En garde! reiterates ephemera.

Gardened skies drawn by children.

Awareness born in fever

ending in char and silhouette

quiet as distant stars

wandering on

through empty doors.

__

PHILLIP MATTHEW ROBERTS. 

PHILLIP MATTHEW ROBERTS is a 43 year old writer who resides in Lexington, Kentucky where he spends most of his days revising poetry between sleep and scribbling away at novels.  When not engaged in these activities he also enjoys good meals shared among good friends accompanied by intimate talk that lasts long into the evening.