The cold steel blue sky
Gathers silence to her
As she prepares to don her widows weeds
The creeping black of night
Crawling all over the land

And hidden inside this blackness
Dreams drift and float
Invisible and upon unseen currents
Restless and searching
For a mind to nourish

Bright within the night
Is a new-born infant
A baby human too young to see
And dreams find their way
Into the open mind of the child

So visions from beyond and past
A million unseen horizons
Where hopes and beliefs are formed
Give light behind unseeing eyes
Making them see wonders

Then the dawn arises
Flooding the land with light
Overwhelming the light within
Burning away at originality
Making the child just one more

Fight for your originality
Because in the end
It is all that we are


By Phil Roberts

So many human beings
Falling through the cracks of society
Parts of every generation
Simply lost
And as the cracks grow wider
More and more fall through
Falling into despair
They exist
Lost from the rest

And within their lives
They have little of anything
As others seem to have it all
Naturally they grow restless
Believing nothing will change
And the younger angrier ones
Become faithless and lawless
Becoming darkly feral
So many human beings
Lost

                          By Phil Roberts

Lost games
Longer lost rules
Night-time crimes
Lungs full
Of pungent smoke
Bellies full of *****
And heads full of
Something
And nothing

A kind of homage
To a kind of music
Riding across vinyl
And even crackling shellac
And the dead man's foot
Still taps inside the coffin
Refusing to relinquish
The hard-wired hammer
The outlaw life
Is hard in the dying

                                    By Phil Roberts

Days of dawns and sunsets
When every hour is full
And every moment has a purpose
Measures of our small lives
Tick tock
Mortality's clock

Outside of ourselves
The crescendo and cadence
Universal movement and momentum
Always and endlessly
Travelling circles and orbits
The ghastly vastness of infinity
Defies human imagination

And yet
Our speck of existence
Tiny though it is
Is all that the cosmos owes us
And we should use it well
Wring every second dry
Open our hearts and minds
And fill them with living

                                        By Phil Roberts

I do not speak in sombre tones
Not for me the gentle echo
Hushing through hallowed halls
I shall growl my way to the grave
Be ****** to the insignificant
And to hell with the indifferent
There are no rules or rulers
There are only fools and foolers

I need no-one else's straight lines
I have imagination enough to swerve
And spite enough to spin
Snapping snarling and seditious
Spitting venomous and vicious
Flamed by the world's injustice
And humanity's indifference
Not until I am dead burned and scattered
Shall I rest assured

                                By Phil Roberts

Living in his feral mind
Always travelling twisted roads
He knows about right and wrong
But he's a very sharp man
And he's noticed who say to do right
Quite often do wrong
So he doesn't take it too seriously

He just does what feels good to him
Without worrying much about others
There's a trail of friends and lovers
Left in careless disarray
As their usefulness to him wanes
He moves on to the next toy


But you can't really blame him
How can you stay angry?
He's just like a little boy
Who doesn't know any better
His eyes charm the birds from the trees
And his smile is as wide as the sea
So that's alright, then

                             By Phil Roberts

Caught in the coils of indifference
It's so hard to want to care
About anything much
Even my flow of poetry
Has become a problematic prostate dribble
Such are the joys of old-fartdom
Come day go day
Wishing my aches and pains away
Life goes on

I remember things that used to worry me
What was I thinking of?
None of it mattered
Young people take the poses that once were mine
And they make me smile
With amused fondness and nostalgia
I am envious of their innocence
But mostly their energy
I need a nap
Life goes on

                           By Phil Roberts