gee i like to think of dead it means nearer because deeper firmer
since darker than little round water at one end of the well   it’s
too cool to be crooked and it’s too firm to be hard but it’s sharp
and thick and it loves,   every old thing falls in rosebugs and
jackknives and kittens and pennies they all sit there looking at
each other having the fastest time because they’ve never met before

dead’s more even than how many ways of sitting on your head your
unnatural hair has in the morning

dead’s clever too like POF goes the alarm off and the little striker
having the best time tickling away everybody’s brain so everybody
just puts out their finger and they stuff the poor thing all full
of fingers

dead has a smile like the nicest man you’ve never met who maybe winks
at you in a streetcar and you pretend you don’t but really you do
see and you are My how glad he winked and hope he’ll do it again

or if it talks about you somewhere behind your back it makes your neck
feel pleasant and stoopid    and if dead says may i have this one and
was never introduced you say Yes because you know you want it to dance
with you and it wants to and it can dance and Whocares

dead’s fine like hands do you see that water flowerpots in windows but
they live higher in their house than you so that’s all you see but you
don’t want to

dead’s happy like the way underclothes All so differently solemn and
inti and sitting on one string

dead never says my dear,Time for your musiclesson and you like music and
to have somebody play who can but you know you never can and why have to?

dead’s nice like a dance where you danced simple hours and you take all
your prickly-clothes off and squeeze-into-largeness without one word  and
you lie still as anything    in largeness and this largeness begins to give
you,the dance all over again and you,feel all again all over the way men
you liked made you feel when they touched you(but that’s not all)because
largeness tells you so you can feel what you made,men feel when,you touched,
them

dead’s sorry like a thistlefluff-thing which goes landing away all by
himself on somebody’s roof or something where who-ever-heard-of-growing
and nobody expects you to anyway

dead says come with me he says(andwhyevernot)into the round well and
see the kitten and the penny and the jackknife and the rosebug
                                                                      and you
say Sure you say    (like that)    sure i’ll come with you you say for i
like kittens i do and jackknives i do and pennies i do and rosebugs i do

Largeness
It’s a mighty fine word
        Until today, that is
That is, today as in society (nowadays)
We are
        “encouraged”
To be small.
        Small waist
        Small nose
        Small arms
        Tiny brain
They can’t handle this muchness
This lushness
They’re afraid of our size
The history of our hills
And mountains of skin
Lofty mountains
A landscape to make an artist sing.

But as they shove us into our
        Small shirts
        Skinny jeans
        Tiny shoes
They forget that this size, this extra-largeness
        Cannot be contained.

We’re busting out of here.
We’re claiming our space with our
        Large feet
        Large *******
        Huge hips
        Our love handles and our lard

Fear our stature
   Our sweetness
   Our ****** wiles
   Our swagger

We are deep people


Large women.

"It comes about that the drifiting of these curtains
Is full of long motions: as the poderous
Deflations of distance: or as clouds
Inseperable from their afternoons;
Or the changing of light, the dropping
Of the silence, wide sleep and solitude
Of night, in which all motion
Is beyond us, as the firmament,
Up-rising and down-falling, bares
The last largeness, bold to see.

I felt this primal urge
This trance-like instinct
To set things right
In case I have to leave
Move on, so to speak

So
I took my jaundiced eye
And rolled it from corner to corner
Of this, my situation
And I felt so very small and hard
Lost in largeness
For cynicism is a tight thing
Which allows little movement
A strange kind of chastity

And then, you see
Changes
Honesty demanded that I see more
Grow, so to speak

And oh, my poor sore eyes
See how the children starve
All over this bitter world
This bitter, sickened world
And cynicism did this
Through the slack hands of millions
Who still refuse to believe
That things can be changed

                                    By Phil Roberts

reverse engineering:

tomorrow
i will know still your voice,
how your silence splits words
into pieces, as you break me
with your collared sweaters and polka dot
socks: tell me i am floating,
question my Gods, forbid me
from touching your church elders; your parents’
Lord.

today
i will know your laughter, a tad frail:
the voice of an unsteady
deity - your fingers - never stilling a pen,
nor sketching a hand - whittling
my own: your chin trembling as you chide me
for their largeness; i show you their erasures:
your lack of wayward lines; your work
of an artist.

yesterday
i tell you to sing, you tell me not to -
you arm yourself and lock away in your room,
say your poetry terrible,
wrong, un-joyful, cross-averted; they cracks
in all the wrong places like your flimsy
hands, like your hopes massive-disintegrating
like the feebleness in your dust-allergic bodies; your lack

of lungs: brittled long by heavy-handed
words and thin brushes: you with death -
the un-wayward stroke: You
who are sickly, whose quiet breaths reach
where we cannot find

and find the places where
our gods long to be touchable.

I felt this primal urge
This trance-like instinct
To set things right
In case I have to leave
Move on, so to speak

So
I took my jaundiced eye
And rolled it from corner to corner
Of this, my situation
And I felt so very small and hard
Lost in largeness
For cynicism is a tight thing
Which allows little movement
A strange kind of chastity

And then, you see
Changes
Honesty demanded that I see more
Grow, so to speak

And oh, my poor sore eyes
See how the children starve
All over this bitter world
This bitter, sickened world
And cynicism did this
Through the slack hands of millions
Who still refuse to believe
That things can be changed

                                    By Phil Roberts

Oleander
Melanie S. Moorman, 2/3/15

Such beautiful pain
Such largeness and gain
Hardened by walls
Built up time & time again

White scented petals
Fill the air - so smooth
Fragrantly wafting -
Singing to the Moon

Lovelorn and tired
She's dressed but uninspired
Her mood changes
But her song is the same

Will you come out tonight?
He says with a longing
Will you put on that dress?
A place your body belongs in

She smiles seductively
He knows what that means
His desire shall be curbed
By a meandering dream

Playfully she calls
But he hears - not too well
Lost in his fears
Where his love for her dwells.

the lean stammer of long balking ***
froths diligently on my lady's bones
and it plastics a largeness heading
southern sea to lake and fire perpendicular
unraveling senses. a mire of spitted
tongues or saliva all a laminating
her magic gaggle of crumbling...
***** and notch; twin ecstatic jumbled
notes in discorded unity of tentative
lips... mymy
mym
     y
my     my mymym

                                  y
my yoke, my egg, my scorpion. ***** me quickly venom

   i'll a                       sprung!

1979, A live broadcast, my father bid me come
to our new color TV set, the high pitched whine
it gave off muted by meaning
"remember this moment" he said
and we watched, in awed silence as
two men, Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin shook hands
and our President presided
a cold peace at last
In retaliation for... Sadat was later shot through
the skull and died on a stage in a pool of warm blood
surrounded by his brethren

A letter dated 1944
My father's fingers trembled with it in his hands
He brought it out to show me
"I am the only survivor...all the rest are gone...
I am going to Israel"
Written hastily with pen and ink, our last
surviving relative who we know not of
bid farewell to Russia and was on track to a new land from the wellspring
of grief and ******

A Jew, my father
A half Jew am I and would have been all the same
to the **** killing machine I thought one languishing summer day
as I ate unripe apples with small wormholes at a farm
full of horses
Safe in the quiet, if uncaring peace of a world far away
from dead Nazis and the abandoned killing centers


Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, 2003
We walked through at night, my husband and I
A large empty space in a city without largeness or emptiness
We walk without recognition
as it is now just a place and not only a shrine
But I linger to look at one corner
At an embedded sculpture of confused cement blocks
jagged angles and useless plains, rendered in immobile lasting cement
a testament to futility
It is pain, frustration and the sickness of human violence--
Itzak Rabin
who was shot and bled to death
in a crowd in the dust of his also unknown and forgotten ancestors
in retaliation for the hope of peace

News of more bombs today
Fresh death
Mangled human potential rendered useless
In retaliation for...

I felt this primal urge
This trance-like instinct
To set things right
In case I have to leave
Move on, so to speak

So
I took my jaundiced eye
And rolled it from corner to corner
Of this, my situation
And I felt so very small and hard
Lost in largeness
For cynicism is a tight thing
Which allows little movement
A strange kind of chastity

And then, you see
Changes
Honesty demanded that I see more
Grow, so to speak

And oh, my poor sore eyes
See how the children starve
All over this bitter world
This bitter, sickened world
And cynicism did this
Through the slack hands of millions
Who still refuse to believe
That things can be changed

                                    By Phil Roberts

Mistakes become badges
You wear on your sleeve
Preaching "humility!" "kindness!"
Things you have learned the hard way

We stumble, and fall
To only sometimes get up
And walk away from the rubble
That is the monument to the past

We must remember that waves
Are just parts of the largeness
Of the grandness
Of the ocean

And that all things
Are caused by other happenings
That are caused by other instances
That weren't out to get you

We are all the same
In that we are all different
In that we are all struggling
Towards a mountain's peak

What I wish I was taught
Years and years ago
(Or maybe it's just something
I wished I listened to in the first place)

Is that there is no mountain peak
That what really brings all of the everythings of wishes
Is recognizing the wind that rustles a leaf
On a struggling plant on the bottom of a forest

That the insignificance is the importance
That the smallness is really overwhelming
In meaning and truth

When we notice the path we are taking, we find the answer to ourselves:
Always mistakenly thinking it lead to a mountain of happiness,
But realizing it's really a road of joy we've been on the whole time.

He Who Presents Visions


He personally fills the frame with a largeness broad shoulders wears the western hat perfectly the
Quintessential westerner handsome he projects comfort he stands good in tall trees he meets life on his
Terms confidence he projects easily with ease he takes his surroundings from their settings transfers
Them to canvas with deftness perfect tone and hue he captures his subjects he takes breathing living
Creatures and landscapes projects his vision of them in intricate detail he creates their life anew in
Flawless demonstrations he prepares this depth of understanding in the studio it is compelling it will
Touch draw ignite your emotional will into the viewing of his work you will see strength exhibited as
Naturally as if you were observing the original in the sight that he had the same light and shading the
Boldness that crosses from ordinary to beautiful his eye never wavers from magnificence and his
Fingers delicately follows the mental picture soft to strong the essence of being is being told wonder
Lives large in his expressive paints a telling by a master in full power of his talent nature is fused
With every ounce of reality that she gives of her proud display structures rise their presence
Phenomenal they have an essence that grabs holds your imagination only lets go when it has given all
Of the pleasure it contains one represented beast of the field causes a staggering effect that empowers
You to make a connection with the heard that is unseen but in your mind you know that it is there the
Billowing cloud and blue sky activates sensations that flow out and over you overwhelming feelings
Burst over you like a cloud burst on a rainy spring day flowers in profusion carpet the land they start
At the edge of the coral at the end of the barn and gently climb up the sloping hill far beyond the snow
Capped peaks shout of grandeur untold sweeping you to the end of a world bordered in a frame and
told on canvass

awakening in the middle of the night
I find myself lying there
pondering 12 foot ceilings
opening eyelids to the space above my head
the tall windows
wondering what the point of all of that space is
aesthetics, historically accurate
to create a sense of largeness, grandness
to draw the buyer in
to provoke a sense of having a better home, a better life?
not very practical
costs more to heat
and cool
difficult to clean
or reach for any other reason
and certainly not inviting shelves for storage.
And at least a gallon more to paint the 12 foot walls.
I conclude that this is simply a waste of space, of money,
designed to please the eye regardless of cost, efficiency or practicality.
just what the people wanted, I guess, if you can afford it.

forgetting you is an impossibility that presents itself ,,,

awareness is the slender shiver your spirit sends trembling through my marrow
it crosses my eyes and sometimes they notice.

unspoken lover,
you heard me when you dissolved
you heard me make the painful human discovery :
death means
i can't touch you even though
you are right there

remember how at your funeral, your mother and father didn't cry?
it either meant strength or suppression. i cried until my couch could not possibly absorb one more
tear,
always struck with the sensation that i knew you better than anyone and then feeling selfish because that is a ******* lie.

bravery is the look on your sallow face the day the chemotherapy made you blind
triumphant, knowing and peaceful
accepting
unafraid.
that night i knew before the phone call
your last seconds echoed in my blood.

echo they shall.

you belong to the impossible largeness of love
and it's okay that i never said the three words
because

in my head, you were never really dead.

He Who Presents Visions

He personally fills the frame with a largeness broad shoulders wears the western hat perfectly the
Quintessential westerner handsome he projects comfort he stands good in tall trees he meets life on his
Terms confidence he projects easily with ease he takes his surroundings from their settings transfers
Them to canvas with deftness perfect tone and hue he captures his subjects he takes breathing living
Creatures and landscapes projects his vision of them in intricate detail he creates their life anew in
Flawless demonstrations he prepares this depth of understanding in the studio it is compelling it will
Touch draw ignite your emotional will into the viewing of his work you will see strength exhibited as
Naturally as if you were observing the original in the sight that he had the same light and shading the
Boldness that crosses from ordinary to beautiful his eye never wavers from magnificence and his
Fingers delicately follows the mental picture soft to strong the essence of being is being told wonder
Lives large in his expressive paints a telling by a master in full power of his talent nature is fused
With every ounce of reality that she gives of her proud display structures rise their presence
Phenomenal they have an essence that grabs holds your imagination only lets go when it has given all
Of the pleasure it contains one represented beast of the field causes a staggering effect that empowers
You to make a connection with the heard that is unseen but in your mind you know that it is there the
Billowing cloud and blue sky activates sensations that flow out and over you overwhelming feelings
Burst over you like a cloud burst on a rainy spring day flowers in profusion carpet the land they start
At the edge of the coral at the end of the barn and gently climb up the sloping hill far beyond the snow
Capped peaks shout of grandeur untold sweeping you to the end of a world bordered in a frame and
told on canvass

Where I'm from
Most kids have never heard the words
"We can't afford that."
Where I'm from
Is marked by men in business suits
Who always seem to work a little too late
Where I'm from
No love for my curves.
"Are you really going to eat that?"
My largeness makes me a target
Where I'm from
Closet bulimics
Binge drink and purge in the morning
Fakeness is the measure of success
Why do you think the popular girls all look the same anyway?
Where I'm from
They act like choosing between a salad and a burger
Is actually a ******* decision.
Where I'm from
****** problem
Know at least three people who lost the light in their eyes
Because the monster blew out the candle
Where I'm from
It might as well be snowing year round
The people are so cold and white
Where I'm from
Nearly every parent is a narcissist
Believes their child is the next Ronald Reagan
He is their idol, after all
Where I'm from
There is no "two-party system"
Republicans win every local election
Where I'm from
They value the sanctity of life
Until one of those lives is an unarmed person of color
Then their tongues become laced with haughtiness and gunpowder
Where I'm from
Makes excuses for bad cops
Welcome to Small Town, America
Where we decorate our racism with jewelry
That way, no one knows the extent of its ugliness
Where I'm from
I ask questions, get shot down
Like Trayvon's body as it lies like an arrow in the street
Why is his life worth less than mine?
Where I'm from
Thinks abortion is ******
If we care so much about babies
Why do we not care that Tamir Rice was twelve
When his last breath was forced from his collapsing lungs?
A baby.
Where I'm from
My privilege becomes a loaded gun
But I will not fire
I try to keep the safety on
Safety on
Because I know I have the potential
To act on the only way of existing
That I have been taught
Where I'm from
At least half my friends' parents were divorced
I was told lying to get ahead
Is better than speaking up
Here is my voice for those who have been silenced by oppression
Where I'm from
Has shown me you cannot outgrow your bloodline
I have betrayal in my background
This is who I was meant to be
Where I'm from
They taught me to pray
So I pray daily
That these hands with the potential to shoot
Will instead pave roads for people
Who cannot currently walk down the street
Without the fear of taking their last steps.

The rails scream in the darkness
Sparking, lambent bulbs trace starlight behind tinted glass
No words, just motionless exhibition of man
Child
The shrill yapping of a terrified pup
Ears plugged from the disastrous din of metal rubbing against itself

The train flies through an evacuated tube pressed beneath the innumerable water column
And it is deafening.

Behind us the gentle shipyards, ahead the recipient city
Waiting to drink up our wallets and time with her promiscuous streets
As she bends her towering legs to the ironically Chinese
Barge
Blowing its baritone warning flutes
As it tugs itself upon her Bays.

I am reading the book, seeing the Brothers through the din, in between the two cities
The two unhappinesses
and the creatures they identify with

It is a giant artifact,
the tube
It protrudes through
The ships
She sunk and constructed
Market, Mission, Pier, a swamp of concrete
Over the dried clump of trees
A thousand bits of Theseus
And the abandoned bones of thirsting men
Running east, towards Pittsburg
Richmond
Warm Springs
The line is soft between these rusting zones
And the gold
Forgotten for silicone

I am reading a book
About brothers and the curse of stone
Sharing stares with dirogenous hobos
And girl's pupils
feasting on bodies hidden behind periodicals

The rails scream in protest
The railcars are turning up and out
Towards the end of the darkness
And the start of the largeness

The city waits to list her failures to me
To cry herself to sleep with raindrops of fog
And rasping breaths of breeze.

sangkutsa— sana'y kartada nuwebe


      stove -- so much inner blue
            in this gruesomeness,
          still soft is the orifice, maiming
         the speech whirling in warm press;

     hand -- to just blindingly toss out
      in wording it so that then this is true:
       we once had each other in the
        simmer of feelings, leaving
         our shadows crazy-eyed in
     elegiac silence.

      rawness -- boiled to a broth:
        thawing largeness, tipping away in
           and of feeling.

    final stages --- half-done in waiting,
      half-undone in wanting. darkness
       condoles with the aperture of
        clouds twitching to rain tritely
   against the tiled floor. islands of
       wet footmarks make the traverse
           viciously slippery on my way
    to your side of breathing.

     all of it -- hand's gentle breeze,
      salt of lake-eyes, melee of tactical pressures sizing down spots gleamed
       and honeyed with ires. a hiss
  on landscaped neck where a peregrinating perfume sits, feverish with
       desire and nothing else,
    blood boiling, whistling through the pores are the saltine sweat
     poised, almost
                               for the mouth's readiness
          in consummation.

I felt this primal urge
This trance-like instinct
To set things right
In case I have to leave
Move on, so to speak

So
I took my jaundiced eye
And rolled it from corner to corner
Of this, my situation
And I felt so very small and hard
Lost in largeness
For cynicism is a tight thing
Which allows little movement
A strange kind of chastity

And then, you see
Changes
Honesty demanded that I see more
Grow, so to speak

And oh, my poor sore eyes
See how the children starve
All over this bitter world
This bitter, sickened world
And cynicism did this
Through the slack hands of millions
Who still refuse to believe
That things can be changed

                                    By Phil Roberts

I felt this primal urge
This trance-like instinct
To set things right
In case I have to leave
Move on, so to speak

So
I took my jaundiced eye
And rolled it from corner to corner
Of this, my situation
And I felt so very small and hard
Lost in largeness
For cynicism is a tight thing
Which allows little movement
A strange kind of chastity

And then, you see
Changes
Honesty demanded that I see more
Grow, so to speak

And oh, my poor sore eyes
See how the children starve
All over this bitter world
This bitter, sickened world
And cynicism did this
Through the slack hands of millions
Who still refuse to believe
That things can be changed

                                    By Phil Roberts

It's not every day I see the wonder.
But from time to time it's impossible to ignore.
Some are wondered by the sun and stars,
While others plumb the great mystery of new birth
Or life continuous.

I look for interference's in life
Both great and small.
For it is at those times that my smallness is unique,
And my largeness is revealed for all of its arrogance.
And as the thunder roars
And the grasses sigh,
I see Him.

I felt this primal urge
This trance-like instinct
To set things right
In case I have to leave
Move on, so to speak

So
I took my jaundiced eye
And rolled it from corner to corner
Of this, my situation
And I felt so very small and hard
Lost in largeness
For cynicism is a tight thing
Which allows little movement
A strange kind of chastity

And then, you see
Changes
Honesty demanded that I see more
Grow, so to speak

And oh, my poor sore eyes
See how the children starve
All over this bitter world
This bitter, sickened world
And cynicism did this
Through the slack hands of millions
Who still refuse to believe
That things can be changed

                                    By Phil Roberts

he reminded me
that hands
that big
were not only meant
to hurt

and another persons
largeness
was not meant
to make me seem
small

thank you
for swallowing
my hand in yours

thank you
for covering me
with love

I felt this primal urge
This trance-like instinct
To set things right
In case I have to leave
Move on, so to speak

So
I took my jaundiced eye
And rolled it from corner to corner
Of this, my situation
And I felt so very small and hard
Lost in largeness
For cynicism is a tight thing
Which allows little movement
A strange kind of chastity

And then, you see
Changes
Honesty demanded that I see more
Grow, so to speak

And oh, my poor sore eyes
See how the children starve
All over this bitter world
This bitter, sickened world
And cynicism did this
Through the slack hands of millions
Who still refuse to believe
That things can be changed

                                    By Phil Roberts

life.
four
letters,
but an
awfully
big
word.

love.
even
bigger,
a word
both
gigantic
and
minute.

live.
being
the
biggest,
broadest,
open to
enterpretation.
but
still
a looming,
largeness
to
behold.


live,
love,
life.


together,
a
mantra
for
a way
to be
large
among
the
small.

tallest
of the
tall.

broad
and
encompassing,
of one
and all.

live,
love,
life,

we all
fall,
sprawl.
but
rise up.

stand
and
fall,
learn,
to
learn,
from
it all.

love,
life.
live,
life.
live,
love.

I went to our special spot today
With a cigarette and a pen
It was still breathtaking.

For the first time in years
I felt small.
You see,
Since I was a child
I have always been overweight.
It used to consume me
It was all I could notice when I looked at myself

Since I was nine
I stashed food and binged
While at thirteen I started purging
As an effort to control my apparent largeness.
Here, I am surrounded by cliffs, rocks and trees
That tower over me
Finally, I am the smallest one in the room
And yet I feel on top of the world.

I am sad to report this place is changing
The stream we used to splash in
Has dried up.
The log where we used to sit
On which you educated me about ***, boys and family
As well as everything in between
Is rotten and soggy.

I am not fond of such changes
Because we both changed too.
You could not shake a ****** addiction
And it eventually took you home.

I, myself, battle
Mental illness and recovery from self-inflicted abuses
That, after one particular incident,
Almost sent me to heaven, too

One more thing before I let you go
I'm sure you're busy, but I wanted you to know
That the cigarette still remains unlit
In my sweatshirt pocket
Not because I forgot a lighter
(Although I did)
But mostly because this overbearing forest
Is my only sacred memory of you
And I could never allow that to
Go up in smoke.

Words can wriggle through the cracks
Where grosser largeness blocks,
And even with no aperture
Huskless speech can seep through locks.

Dear Diary,
       As I look onto you as I write these feelings down, these are the feelings that I have found
Dear Diary,
       As I look onto you you, are my mirror, you are the reflections of my fears
Dear Diary,
       As I look onto you, I see your largeness, I must face this darkness
Dear Diary,
       As I look onto you, this is where I write your lies, Where they most certainly must die
Dear Diary,
       As I look onto you, these are not my confessions! This is not my profession!
Dear Diary,
       This is not me!!! Now I must make a run for it and I must flee!!

I felt this primal urge
This trance-like instinct
To set things right
In case I have to leave
Move on, so to speak

So
I took my jaundiced eye
And rolled it from corner to corner
Of this, my situation
And I felt so very small and hard
Lost in largeness
For cynicism is a tight thing
Which allows little movement
A strange kind of chastity

And then, you see
Changes
Honesty demanded that I see more
Grow, so to speak

And oh, my poor sore eyes
See how the children starve
All over this bitter world
This bitter, sickened world
And cynicism did this
Through the slack hands of millions
Who still refuse to believe
That things can be changed

                                    By Phil Roberts

My teacher
Shares out of  largeness
Spits saliva on my head  
Like the insect larva that swells

My teacher
The one whose back I rode
With his shoulders and lift
I climbed to the pinnacle.


© A. O. Nwulia Literary Diary 2016

it is many things
     solitary -- through ripeness
    and rawness, through the
      locomotion of dancers,
     and sensibilities of
     quiet tongues.

it is the many things you
    give alone, its persistent comma, its continual ellipsis.
    the inundation of delineations
and the gravity of its punctuation.

  with its fingers meandering
to touch a soul's lifted ether,
or simply to hush and still
  repugnant waters - astonishing
all nebula with its largeness.

it is so many intentions,
   yet, a single iteration.
  inveigled are the white shadows
of walls streaked with black light.

  what
     is
       it?

it is perhaps an impending collision,
   to no soul's severance:
it is the meshwork of grace
     or foolishness;
  it is the working of the word
from so many lovers and singlehandedly nailing us to our
    stationed cicatrices.

love's epigraphic, weightless,
   no more than size of
      a captured wave in net
  of stone: concealed in an eye's
     limitless space.Q

I felt this primal urge
This trance-like instinct
To set things right
In case I have to leave
Move on, so to speak

So
I took my jaundiced eye
And rolled it from corner to corner
Of this, my situation
And I felt so very small and hard
Lost in largeness
For cynicism is a tight thing
Which allows little movement
A strange kind of chastity

And then, you see
Changes
Honesty demanded that I see more
Grow, so to speak

And oh, my poor sore eyes
See how the children starve
All over this bitter world
This bitter, sickened world
And cynicism did this
Through the slack hands of millions
Who still refuse to believe
That things can be changed

                                    By Phil Roberts

Now
The thunderous joy subsides
And I am out of breath
Cheeks hurting
Do I wear this face of self
Everywhere i go?
Do they see?
The confliction in creases
The smallness
The largeness
Of things
The disproportionate
Incapacities
I am no sombre-eyed bird
They say I smile sweetly
But I do not like my teeth
I do not like my joy
I am stiffled by my
Beautiful
Self-acceptance show
It is terrifying to appear
To be seen, twisted
Moulded over and over
By the eyeless mind,
Ever unchanged and
Impossibly me
I am open
For all but myself to see
And how many faces
For how many watchers
Am I to wear them all?
By God, am I to become them

A memorable lover gives nostalgia, a melodic shape,
and only if you could forward the images to exterior,
everywhere you walk would turn into songs of love.
And existence itself could benefit from, knowing that
real is still reachable. That craving, the emotional
awakening, even in the mind’s intellect knows, the
memories of this pastime, gesture beyond the heart
of poetry and it’s transcends everything human. A
peculiar largeness to one’s whole essence. This engagement
of one’s own past, like it’s said, that real and pure love
is there, using this present thread of moments, parents
one’s own future. And if that real love that poetry
speaks about in such sinless grace does not exist,
I don’t want to know. Some things are better left unsaid.
Her, provides such a strong faith, to which poetry had
always failed in, that the love of soulmates can provide
is there and in this world, to be honest, I wouldn’t
be able to express it anyway, I’ll be pulled forward to
experience it and has left me with reason and meaning
to be alive. (Doesn’t being burnt, leave such a bitterness
to one’s life, that drips and veils everyone a certain
distrust?)  
- knowledge variable

I felt this primal urge
This trance-like instinct
To set things right
In case I have to leave
Move on, so to speak

So
I took my jaundiced eye
And rolled it from corner to corner
Of this, my situation
And I felt so very small and hard
Lost in largeness
For cynicism is a tight thing
Which allows little movement
A strange kind of chastity

And then, you see
Changes
Honesty demanded that I see more
Grow, so to speak

And oh, my poor sore eyes
See how the children starve
All over this bitter world
This bitter, sickened world
And cynicism did this
Through the slack hands of millions
Who still refuse to believe
That things can be changed

                                    By Phil Roberts