There is of
me so little
to be buff
that fickle
you wants.
You so vain
need me to explain.
You then see magasines
make bad mirrors.

Devouring the ravaging portrayal of arousal
Humming at tunes only heard and misunderstood
While forming science from abstract and holding
Pencils with dreamy hands enveloping haunting
And daunting beauty from within
As cerebral impulses begin exploding

I hate when you leave the toilet seat up
Or how you spill toothpaste over the sink
I hate finding your clothes hung over furniture
And how you sleep pushed up against my back
Radiating your heat all through the night
I hate even more waking and realizing you're gone
I still can't bring myself to erase the signs of you
It's been a hundred and twenty days since you left
A hundred and twenty days since I last saw you
A hundred and twenty days since I touched you
I remember staying up late at night
You said you'd travel to the most distant places
With or without me
I never thought you'd actually do it
A hundred and twenty days since you left
I still feel you pushed up against me at night
And I wake to an empty spot on the bed
With a matching pain in my heart
While grief is the only one I wake up to
A hundred and twenty days since your death

Misty words billow in the cold
Pluming from their mouths
Quiet swearing and first *** coughing
They walk close to hedgerows
Kicking the dew from the grass
As birds squabble over breakfast
And mushrooms are still socialising
They whistle the dogs to heel
All panting and wagging tails
Stirring the dawn damp air
For happy is the early dog
In these sumptuous fields

Now the business of dawn begins
Low sharp commands are uttered
Bringing the younger bounding learners
To a proper sense of purpose
And that high-toned cross breed
The sleek and swift lurcher
Is eternally proud and primed
This long-sprint racer
Takes inevitable chase
Without sentiment or concious cruelty
An ancient craft is practised here
With the dogs at dawn

                                By Phil Roberts

I sit and try and be a lotus
after killing the third fly of the evening
with a pocket book of recipes and a
thirty centimetre ruler stolen
from bathroom **** measuring contests to our knees.

Young professionals tread these boards
and I watch, trying to paint them lotus.

I listen and learn like I was told to do
then clock watch, mop, cycle home to you;
I am still trying to be a lotus
even in wet shoes and no socks.

With less than five-hundred pounds to my various names,
an office-chair-***-clothes-horse, eight USB charging ports
and a future that stretches to Sunday’s last reluctant second,
I am sitting, trying to be lotus figuring out the professional path
David Attenborough heard in his gentleman’s class: that son of a-

- I walked into an army recruitment vault with dreams of being Gulliver,
though was asked to leave out the cat flap cathedral door back into war
as they’d got their laugh and didn’t applaud.

Perhaps I should’ve been better at maths
where apparently a career can be predicted on a scatter graph,
and the pigeons of today were the pigeons of next year and the months that’ll follow the century after that.

I am still trying to figure out the hoo-ha of *******
and ring fingers and collar sizes and the inner circles
of hyenas when the winter solstice splits the seasons.

There is no reason for this lotus procrastination
when what’s there to live for but a crooked world
and one bandage left.

Silver vein'd and shaking through.
The night oppresses me with a speed relentless
and a sound constant: the insect hum, the air conditioned rattle.
And I drop myself and I tuck myself and I sleep myself
as best I can.
And her hushed song, her morning song, her routine song,
while she plucked herself white and shaved herself clean,
enters the sacred corridors of my sleep. And her face burns
into my mind. Something religious. She's a godhead,
one who exists with or without my permission. And I'd
sing along with her if it weren't for the sleeping. But I'm
diffusing all responsibility and I'm creeping toward the center
of that otherworld, where logic and time bow to her
and who am I?
so I bow too.
The days of my old life, the ones well lived, bleed in
and the regrets smooth themselves out and I dab at
her makeup with a wet napkin and I say this:

Do you have any idea how many times I've said
I love you to an empty room?

Hand me that pistol
don't let it go off in your clutches

Give me the ammo
stay and watch me load

The first few pops
shake me out of my skin

Sweat pouring down my forehead
I feel like losing control

Nervous as a first date
hard to draw a bead

Okay, gently squeeze
the trigger, count... one two, three