Shiny bricks and skeins of yellow grass
Barely perceptible colours
Hung with liquid haze
Dog **** and thunder
Heavy close and thick
Miasma
Clings to sweat
Running with drizzle
Clings to damp
Drowning the pores of the skin
Making collars clinging sticky
Rubbing and abrasive

In view of the towering flats
The greyly awaiting wait
Standing at the bus stop
Speaking quiet weather talk
In the distantly English way
So safely meaningless
This polite evasion
Ignores their damp dilemma
Soon, as they sit inside the bus
These bodies shall steam
Like cattle in a byre

Kids hang around the shops
Emptying and kicking cans
The younger ones
Run and shout manically
Their elders spit
And swear casually
All hoods and shadows
Asking adults to buy them lager
Because they can't get served at the "offie"
Rain changes nothing here

A bedroom guitar plays
Weakly electric
And the Turneresque sky
Swallows the sound whole and flat
Sophisticated trash
Crying into a cloudy breast
Shaded darkly round
Full and swollen
Grey and sodden
The distant rumbling
Tumbling closer to home

                                    By Phil Roberts

Novembers blast from icy north
chills our bones and vocal chords.
Ice songs polar poetry tinted blue
lips exhale steamed dragons smoke.

I sit here looking through my window
At the early morning mist and mizzle
My mind is still sluggish and half dreaming
Drifting through memories and images
Without purpose or reason
And from nowhere
I remember a night in the past
When I awoke crying a name
And my secret was betrayed to the moon
And the name was your's

                                               By Phil Roberts

so long ago,, perhaps before
I was thought of
on the shoulder of a mountain
i was an old cedar
then, and lived centuries
just watching
the world turn
and the mountain and me knew
what was important
was being
more than I know
in this life
in the shadow
of then
now.

Edges of shadows
In the corners of eyes
Too fast to see
It might be me

Is it true
What you see?
Is it real?
Is it really me?

You do not hear my voice
Or know the colour of my eyes
You would not know me in the street
Or recognise my accent
Should we meet

And yet
You have seen my soul
In the words I write
And even the spaces between them

Those who care to look
Can know my story
My frailties
My vulnerabilities
My reality

This may be my curse
And my gift to you
Whatever it may be
You know that it is true

                                   By Phil Roberts