We're old swords, my
lovely— dogged, not
learning from the two
hundred years that our
city's been burning; we're
just ashes to ashes and
in between, yearning.

When young hearts break
Tears fall like blood from an open wound
And it feels as though Life itself must end
But, of course, it never does
Despite despair's certainty
Everything carries on as before

And when a dearly loved one dies
The soul- scraping pain inside
Would wrench sobs from rocks
Life will never be the same
That pain will always remain
Though the world continues to turn

Blood and tears soon dry
Whoever may bleed or cry
Everything passes along with time
Rivers flow in just the same way
As sure as night follows day
There is no mercy in nature's way

                                    By Phil Roberts

Exit Tchaikovsky into the smoking mirror,
humid masks of the night servants
stalking down the water-walk.

Ash falls from a high tongue
all across the face of the moon embassy
like a bony comb through snow's hair.

Fade to brass: the cars sneer across the street,
interrupting blonde melodies held rapt
in plastic by cigarette Rapunzels.

I sit by the flower dress.
Bare legs slip across the old eye trellis
that masses by the death-green park,

muffling the memories that break free
from the black seance. I'm a braid of regret.
A bird is dead on the cement.

This breeze would scarcely stir a wasp-wing;
how will it ever bear away the coming rain
massing in loose cuffs over the flat-faced slate?
It won't. The rain will squat here in the gray
like Baba Yaga's hut. My eye drowns
in the soft drift of the water petals.
There is a single white cloud, doubled
in the black water of the road. It doesn't move,
as if paralyzed. There is no joy in this place,
only this numb wisp that hangs
like a poorly glued ornament:
a quick wheeze, a gasp, a cigarette breath,
a wracked cough, a corpse-smear.

Dearest,

I sit with your plucked wildflowers,
in the near blue hours that ramble past
like a coach-and-four. You return
"upon the morrow” and I have said
your name aloud so often
it is thin as gold leaf.
Crow's speech marks the new day
under a gunmetal fog-dome
that slips spells in the sinking heat.
The gray river sidles along the city;
I'm out of time. I send my love.

Blackly digging in the ten o'clock hour -
the rain already came and went -
the District is dying of moon-steam,
a summer that chokes even the princes of air.

I am mortally alone. My chaperone,
a brimming glass, turns a blind eye
to my piling thirst. Pylons of shadow
gather in the alley like barren trees.

My monstrous shirt clings to me,
accentuating the beer-pounds.
I pray for a swift end to this grit-grind,
a legacy of revolving abandonment.

Numb, dulled, I stare out at the sparse
traffic cleaving to the bitumen, red lights
& bare legs floating by in the wheeling hour,
tone poems of pale flesh and sad laughter.

This is very close to the bottom:
the scotch that scrapes my tongue clean,
the freshly washed glass, the beckoning bed
that promises only dead dreams,
                                                          pillows of sand.

I watch, take a grab
of the facts, rearrange the *****
to body's own and the world

constructions of fragments
of reality and myself, the truth
of my existence, my who I am:

turbulent clouds
in my sleep
and reckless pilots

of medicinal substances
that play with me
throwing me back and forth

through the hell
they mold out of my life
and I can only watch

Sometimes they also fly by day --
from my very own memory
I am thought by foreign substances