A man in a field walks through a storm.
Snowflakes on his eyelashes blur his vision.
A man in a study believes in snow,
believes in the truth of snow.

A man leaves traces as he walks.
His tracks ornament the field’s blank.
He meanders, doubles back, evading,
leaves imprints that the snow erases.
A man walks. The snow falls.  

In a study, a man devotes himself to snow.
He reads from the book of snow.
He composes wintry axioms.
“Snow:  Atmospheric water vapor frozen into ice crystals
that drop on a walking man’s eyelashes
or lie blank in an unwritten field.

“Snow is a conflict,
a confusion, a yearning.
Letters are desire.
Margins are melancholy.”

The storm disappears.
A man squints at blurred words,
Resumes writing,
Shaking snow from the page.

Dirt caked crust
Gives way
To layers of mantle
Above afflicted fireplace
Bearing picture frames
Bitter memories
Pride, then regret
Memento mori

I will not die here
Two tiers from hell
I feel it burning
In my core
Patiently waiting
To take me in pity
As I wish it had done
Before

Silent waters
But crashing waves
Trying to be stronger
For I have too much to save

Treading the water
Lightly
I'm going under
I can't breathe

Don't know how to live
Too much to take
Too much to give
I'm just afraid

I'm falling down
I can't hold on any longer
Watch me drown
In the silent waters

My skin remembers your fingers.
My calm remembers your care.
I loved once and was loved.
Read this to me when I'm not there.

I have little thought for these days
As the future evaporates
And the past grows fat and vivid
I amuse myself with games of flashback
Faces and places flickering
Across an empty mind
Dragging their stories behind them
Dead memories metamorphosing
Into living visceral dreams
Where the flowers of love and loss
Are intertwined so closely
That with the passing of time
They each rob the other
Of some pain and glory
As reality gives way
To a realisation of truth

                                      By Phil Roberts

“Forgetting is the purest form of clarity.”
--Someone

And so ended the unquiet dreams
awkward reunions with the dead
wandering the halls of sleep,
the bodies of others’ loss.
Ghosts gone from the gazebo.
No laments in the lowering sun.

She woke. Blue sky blinked into her eyes.  
The room’s climate began to clear.
The familiar path from bed to door
curled into a stone staircase.
When did that get there?  
There was writing on the wall
near a waterfall.

She climbed. She soared.  
She leant a myth to god.
She stood in a garden with five black stones.
She foretold an eclipse,
Burned the witch of winter,
Stepped in the same river twice.

The moon shrank into the alarm clock’s face.
Her breath brewed clouds above her forehead.
She sat aloof in the empty air,
Alone in the immense morning,
At rest in clear, cold perfection.

There's a place I can go, to escape all the fear,
Where I'm free to be me, and can cry floods of tears,
It's a place in my mind that's a beautiful room,
It defends me in times of the terrible gloom..

I just stumbled across it one terrible day,
When I needed to end it all,and drift away,
I was making a plan, which would end everything,
When this voice, out of nowhere, made my ears ring..

And a film roll of pictures and sounds it would give,
Some of young, some of old, they inspired me to live,
So i listened and cried a lot, feeling it so,
And decided to store it all, wanting to know..

So I nurtured and kept it all deep in my head,
And I labelled that room of glee "For times of Dread",
So of course when the gloom takes hold, I knock three times,
And I'm welcomed with love, so inside I climb..

And a shower of images, sounds and such love,
Keeps me safe and alive, and it fits like a glove,
Scenes of happiness, wonder and sweet sanctuary,
Are all tucked up inside, for when I lose......the real me.....