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 Apr 2017 ZOO
phil roberts
Suddenly the humble
There is one eye again
Smears
Smoothly down and quick
Spaced
The silent teeth
Graveyard slabs
All scared to white
Bright full-moon night
Glaring like a naked bone
Water taps and drips
Shaped so perfectly cold
This bleakest of light
Casting long and sharp and deep
The wailing pathetic
Are silver shards of shapes
The graveyard owl screeches
This must be someone's dream

Nowhere to go
Still strong currents pull
The places of despair
Towards and away
The tonality of moods
Warming layers
Blending with the background
It's nobody's business

A sigh that trembles
Lives balancing on whims
And then a silver-grey sky
Soaring on a song
The grace of an artless child
Smiles your eyes to smiles
The crystal tumbling stream
hallucinations of diamond water
The endless beginning
Sliding on rolling moments
Changing even truth
Even truth

                By Phil Roberts
 Apr 2017 ZOO
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
 Apr 2017 ZOO
phil roberts
See through
Tall under the sun
Crawling beneath stars
In night-time skull
Thoughts behind eyes
Behind dreams
Under darkness
And above light

See through
Pretended truths
Without words or form
Shadow shapes
Lay like death
Choreographed corpses
Meaningless memories
Damaged dreams
Piled upon writhing hopes

See through
Tender tragedy
Daily despair
Grasping at lies like air
And in the stillness of dawn
The cold of morning light
Water drips
Or maybe blood
Tapping through silence

                                     By Phil Roberts
 Apr 2017 ZOO
r
Black
 Apr 2017 ZOO
r
Tonight watching the waves
break over Dead Woman's
Shoals quite a ways away
through the windows
of the Riverview
where I once thought the bar
was the bottom of a boat
scarred deep from the drink
on the rocks and sand bars
until I realized it was a coffin
shellacked black
as the hazards of marriage
between a waterman
and a lonely woman
black as the soft leather
of the stool climbed
and kicked away
black as the water
the night
you found her there
still swinging
from the rope
of the nets
she repaired
for her man
while he was away
chasing the catch
deep in the darkness
of the black waves.
====================
Peace begins with a smile
On the long road transfers fear and guile
Smile is sacred not the hypocrite's wile

~~~Jawahar Gupta~~~
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