Those twin oppressors
Time and silence
Weigh heavy on my consciousness
Digging up the graves of the past
Memories thought to be dead and gone
Stalking my mind again
Reminding me of the fool I've been
The pain I've known
The wrongs I've done
And those done to me
All returned to destroy
What passes as my peace of mind

                                By Phil Roberts

There's a quiet murmuration
Of figments of my imagination
Dreams and broken notions
Feelings and emotions
Swirling and rearranging
Into ever-changing shapes in my mind

There are absent gods and howling dogs
And the broken backs of the poor
While jugglers perform tricks with wealth
As nobody seems to care anymore
Amidst marching boots as children shoot
And hope lies dead on the floor

There seems to be a ghost somewhere
Wandering high in purple mountains
And low in deep green valleys
And this roaming soul may well be
A kind of long lost truth
Inside my hidden mind

                               By Phil Roberts

As a writer you gotta accept a simple truth...there will be days when the pen wins while there will be days when the page triumphs.

Caught in the tangled, death of weeds
I hear the shots ring out
It has begun--
between the fading day of sky and hollow
crackling ice beneath my feet

Again, resounding shots above my head
with baying hounds
and threat of voices blazoning the prey
I do as I have always done--
make a run for it….
and always, in the past
I seemed to get away

My soul is sinking, this time
along with boots in ******* mud
-soaked panic-sweat
clambering up a bank in naked peril
numb with cold
Heaving breaths billow
onto frigid air
Stumbling sluggish
Moments cling
Inertia--
grapples for an edge...

With all my body's strength
exhausted longing
I heave myself back...

Fear floods out
like birth
into the lake of waking

A long time there
I lay
paralyzed, dumbfounded