what will you bring away with you
when these ribs remain eclipsed by
the cresting oblong bed of
the wildest purple snapdragon?
will you take the smell of hay that
remains above the sound of hungry gasoline teeth
and dripping dismembered sap?
will you bring away this empty field
so full of passing pollen?
will you bring away these chasing thought
so lost in maddening wonder?

bring me away with you, please,
as you lift above in feathered flutters
with eyes of earnest authority.
bring me away, with you, please.

...Yet I still have visions of
Death and his father,

Disconsolate and privy
The tears of his mother

His love for her deep but
No one should know,
For her burden is heavy,
And her shoulders are low

6 billion,
7 billion,
she rotates all the more...

And yet I still have these visions
Of death and his father,

Furrowing along space without
Sister nor brother,
Sitting by his feet gaining his wisdom
Like fodder

The unenviable task,
Despised by all,
Such a burden to bear
Such a levy to toll...

Lost games
Longer lost rules
Night-time crimes
Lungs full
Of pungent smoke
Bellies full of *****
And heads full of
Something
And nothing

A kind of homage
To a kind of music
Riding across vinyl
And even crackling shellac
And the dead man's foot
Still taps inside the coffin
Refusing to relinquish
The hard-wired hammer
The outlaw life
Is hard in the dying

                                    By Phil Roberts

April...my early sonnets...leaning on the windowsill as the streets were mad rivers, Mum in bed just behind me--ya, I've long been the nightowl, though how many times I'd hang out with her when I did.



(sonnet #MMMMMMCCLXVIII)


Ah, silver gloaming whose soft light is thence
More yellow than wee baby leaves' detail
Of green chartreuse as rain now waltzes, pale
Yet with that subtler voice in tow, lawns hence
Thick carpets laid out 'gainst grey racks a sense
Of pink like fragile mists haunts to avail,
These naked boughs in lingerie black's scale
Just tinges, April clothed ere nightfall, whence?
O me!  The blacktop sports thin puddles fer
A touch of wet, and Friday's hallowed to
Some, good cuz dunno why, as we talk.  Were
It taxes or the missiles elsewhere, who
Shall--what?  I listen, laugh, want Andrew, poor
As saying is, and recall Mum:  all we knew.

14Apr17c