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

Nothing drastic
Nothing pure
Noble stains
Distinct liquid drinking
Slipping and seeping
Coming calm in the world
Knowing nothing
Calling into air
Surviving
Discovery
Certain and uncertain motion
Always motion
Interior rivers pulse
Ancient wisdom
Reawakening
Slowly
Irresistably stretching
Infinitely entwined
Endlessly on

                            By Phil Roberts

There were four of us
Roger, Linda, Roy and me
All smoking too much
Banter and chatter fluttered
Roger was quieter than usual
But I think he was decades in the past
Nevertheless, as we smoked more
He got into the swing of things
As the clock's hands moved on
We were just killing time

At last we decided it was time
And we all piled into Linda's car
As we reached the end of the road
The hearse slowly drove across us
Then we saw the guitar on the coffin
His crazy old pink stratocaster
And the years softly fell away
In that wooden box lay our old friend
Memories of his twisted humour
The way he held his arms when he laughed
The way he played that pink guitar
And his wild imagination
All gone forever

                          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 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

There's a shower of rain
Yet the sun still shines
There must be a rainbow
Somewhere

An old man nods in his chair
He came from nowhere
And went nowhere else
Journeying all the way

Now he journeys through time
Down the aching years
Things that he's seen and done
Some good and wondrous
And some of them terrible

An old man nods in his chair
Travelling
Behind closed eyes
All the things he's seen and done
The people he's known
All the things he's said
Within his nodding head

Tears pour down his face
Down the canyons grooved by time
And yet he smiles
Gently and softly
There must be a rainbow
Somewhere

                       By Phil Roberts

I turn my face to the light
But the low winter sun
Is shrouded in unmoving clouds
Offering no warmth at all
The trees are stark and naked
Like jagged skeletons
With ragged crows hovering
And the world is breathless

For this winter
This of all winters
The air is crowded and heavy
With the ghosts of the painful dead
Their accusing eyes searching
For those whose negligence
In the blast of a plague
Caused their breathless deaths

                                         By Phil Roberts