Sunday, January 1, 2017

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




1 comment :

  1. the best living poet i know; his work stands on it's own and has no age or time limit. Excellence in word form.

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