How dark and long the night
Growing up in the care
Of you, my mother
Unstable and violent
With fists as fast as your hair-trigger temper
I was very young when I learned to take a punch
And fly across a room with the best of them

But you taught me to read before I started school
And you read Dickens to me for hours
Igniting my love of words and stories
But even then
The storm could crash at any time
"What a quiet, well-behaved little boy.
Isn't he shy?"

But the worst thing you ever did to me
You told a lie as big as the moon
You said that my real father, the gypsy
Was dead
When I met him, in my teens
The world lurched slightly
And never went back to normal
And the worst thing is
I was still too scared to call you a liar

                                              By Phil Roberts

so i says to the bear when he woke,



hello,

i will be quiet today.



why, he replies.



my friend has died.



the bear says, then i shall be quiet too.



sbm

Sunday morning,
the air froze, the dahlias
once bloomed angry,
now they shiver and sigh.

Autumn breeze, faint but still,
the padded ghost-steps
of your laugh, running wild,
like vintage photographs;
scattered Polaroids of
my memory - a smile here,
a grimace there.

How the heat of
emotions buries itself
in the clothes of yesterday,
How difficult it is to
fetch from the seams.
The needles only *****
at a faint feeling.

I wonder; do you forget me
as winter forgets the living?

Because once an old man
told me I had sad eyes

Sunsets melt to chalky lines,
like cigarette stubs, they died
when you met her.

These days only my fingers
remember summer,
I touch the hearts of others
to warm them too.

My voice wind chimes,
the eulogy of the storm,
when I breath your
name I shudder...

And listen-
because I am in
the echoes
of her, of us.