The world is losing
Gravity,
But no one can escape,
We're hurtling on our petrie dish
In a gel that seals our fate;
Gravitating
Towards black holes;
They're closer than you think.

In China
There's a wall of dust,
Seen clear from outer space;
Our living waters die
In a legacy of disgrace.
We're citizens
Wearing masks;
We should hide our faces,
But we're running daily tasks.
We're fossils burning
Fossil fuels
Found in cremation gas.

The amphibians
Are on the fringe;
Whales can't sound,
They run aground.
It's an environmental slaughter.

Our world has lost
Some gravity.
We need to plant our feet,
But  charnel fires
And greenhouse gas
Have hastened our retreat.
Migrating birds lose sense of time,
Confused by the lights.
The morning dove coos at night,
The nightingale at dawn;
We're like
New turtles muddling,
Under lost starlight.
We must grasp
The gravity
Of burning
Burning  light.

A true story of a chance gathering of strangers in the back room of a Gelato Parlor *** restaurant, two years ago, in a little village near the bay, on a land surrounded by vineyards. Come visit.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~­~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Gelato Nation

There is a place,
location secret,
mine to keep,
mine with which
you to tease,
make you envious,
a back room 'office'
jealous guarded
by a barkeep,
whose chosen invites sweeps
you into a reality that is
what you will it to be.

But nota bene, note well,
remembrances of things swell
from your past be the
only tongue spoken here.  

Code word entry only,
a shared whisper.
Perhaps One Woman,
may reveal its pleasures,
if she so chooses,
which are:

gelato laughs, poetry snaps,
Beatle songs sung ensemble,
by rag tag strangers
self-collected accidentally,
sung de rigeur off key
by voices lubricated by
cognac, laughter, and
the coldest of white wines,
issue of the very soil
upon which we sit.  

Words to value properly,
not in my possess to capture
the few moments in time when;

Strangers transform themselves
into a triple A nation united,
that will never be
S&P; downgraded.

A holy alliance
celebrating July 4th
all night long,
all participants
signatory witnesses to
its gelato conception,
as well as pallbearers
to its last drink dissolution,
the fullness of its lifetime
a vintage of a few hours extant,
a vintage, once drunk, is
a history, forever gone.

Mixologists please record:

One playwright, a psychologist, bond trader and a social scientist
with a dash of museum director,
and do not forget the
Hundred Year Old Woman,
whose Dowager Princess Daughter
(she, a mere eighty)'
from Central Park West
clarifies all of life dilemmas with
the singular analytical tool of:

But is it good for the Jews?

But t'is the barkeep
who is the leavening
in this evenings human
pastry-petrie dish.

He makes the pastiche,        
the ions of personalities,
coalesce best,
guitar strummer,
singer of songs that were our
multiple national anthems
when we were pseudo-rebels
starting out on our
long and winding roads.  

Long the King of the Keep!
Long live the memory of our
Gelato Nation,
may it stay sweet in
our antique collection of
the best moments of
our intersecting lives.

July 2011

Life of a $&%!#*-%^3(!&

Whispers,
Screams,
Conversations,
Music,
Demands,
Preferences,
But never silence.
Dear god there is never a moment of silence.
The things they say,
The things I see...
The things they make me feel.
As if there are eyes burning into the back of my skull.
Watching...
Waiting.
For the perfect moment;
When I'm sad,
Mad,
Lonely,
Vulnerable.
To catch me at my lowest,
So I will obey every word they so elegantly whisper
From the back of my own mind.
Ultimately my own twisted thoughts,
Paranoia,
Fears,
Anger.

Life of a Schizophrenic

The world is losing
Gravity,
But no one can escape,
We're hurtling on our petrie dish
In a gel that seals our fate;
Gravitating
Towards black holes;
They're closer than you think.

In China
There's a wall of dust,
Seen clear from outer space;
Our living waters die
In a legacy of disgrace.
We're citizens
Wearing masks;
We should hide our faces,
But we're running daily tasks.
We're fossils burning
Fossil fuels
Found in cremation gas.

The amphibians
Are on the fringe;
Whales can't sound,
They run aground.
It's an environmental slaughter.

Our world has lost
Some gravity.
We need to plant our feet,
But  charnel fires
And greenhouse gas
Have hastened our retreat.
Migrating birds lose sense of time,
Confused by the lights.
The mourning dove coos at night,
The nightingale at dawn;
We're like
New turtles muddling,
Under lost starlight.
We must grasp
The gravity
Of burning
Burning  light.

"Yell that one out when you get it" she said in what she considered her most calm and gentle tone. Her calculations were wrong though. What she considered calm and gentle still seemed animated and intense to her audience.

By this grade and age most children have been trained to raise a hand to answer class questions or request the floor.

She began realizing more and more that she spent her days within a room of tiny robots, in a building of tiny robots, in a town of various types of robots... situated in a galaxy of dust that accumulated on the surface of the Great Petrie Dish.

This was not where she wanted to be.

All along his path he grabbed the sticks that called to him. There were many in this area which was surrounded by concrete yet, enough nature inside to forget the dull grays.  Still along the way he traded these sticks and twigs for other sticks and twigs that he placed earlier in naturally occurring hammocks cradled within the bark of an old tree knot or between two inviting branches.

Each stick and twig that he moved was followed by a message of gratitude and the intent to do no harm.  A pinch pull of hair from his arm was placed here in reverie of balance and reciprocation.

Walking by, I noticed this and waved to him  thinking, "wouldn't life be a little better if we all ran around in a circle and enjoyed the healing power of play. It feels good to let go." Then I thought to myself, "that was totally awkward. I just waved like a guest walking onto the stage for a visit with Oprah".

I was fat non- hippie backwards hat fried from acid tabs and Hendrix Stuttgart posters for hours while rewinding the instrumental track that followed the song "drug store cowboy" on a dubbed Justin Warfield tape over and over again. Those years floated me from the village on my floor to adult ADHD and a far off gaze.

The neighbors hate when I run around my back yard shirtless chanting and banging a drum on rainy evenings.

At goodwill Buy the Pound
every day is black friday
Hundreds of soccer moms line up their
white sneakers on a black and yellow caution tape line
zombie over it streching for yu-gi-oh cards
wait for hazmat suits to wheel out eight bins full of trash gone treasure.
When the bins are locked in place the hazmat suits go back to pack another load

The air horn sounds.
You do not want to be anywhere near that caution tape line when this happens.
At goodwill buy the pound
If you're not part of the fight,
you're part of the floor.
They need to find their
puzzle peices lost in cat liter
Johnny really needs
every single nerf dart
DID YOU TAKE A NERF DART?!
WE TALKED ABOUT THIS JO-ANN
THOSE WERE FOR JOHNNY.
Johnnys grandma is not the only elder throwing elbows
varacose veins are curb stomping dads hauling consoles to make a quick buck
Skinny College aged video game collectors swim through the mom-pocalypse
raid the stashes for disguarded NES cartridges
Jo-ann grabs a twinky boy by the black graphic hoodie.
Tosses him back into the horde
lunges for a barbie doll hidden under some wires.
This is not a place for nice children.
If you aren't willing to push around some nanas
you will leave covered in nike prints.
This place turns people.
Ever look at someones mom and think
She looks like she's always wearing a mask.
She is!
Buy the pound is her natural habitat.
One grandma keeps so many cats, her living room is a Petrie dish
I think she just wants to be in charge of a small third world countrey.
Granny needs to go rally up the soccer moms at buy the pound.
To lead those cats into a mother thirfting revolution
These woman leave feeling like they saved their family a fortune
Dumpster diving for sport.
Every tossed or trampled stranger
One flip flop closer to
feeding their children
clawing through poverty

When that airhorn sounds again.
They scurry back to their carts.
Tell their children
"Make sure nobody steals this"
as they line back up in haste.
Touch their all white nikes to the caution tape line.
Hold their family close like brass knuckles.
when that airhorn sounds.
It's time to fight.

sure sure, forgive & forget, but you can't do both in a one-sided simultaneousness: forgive with anger, but forget with peace, for your own sake.

that comic abstract i wrote about children
and mathematics being first learned in units
and not π, π being akin to the word onomatopoeia
in some pandemonium of reverse
of the novel, well, i know 1 is odd, 2 is even,
but when walking and drinking i went a step further:
0 (left leg forward), 1 (right leg forward),
2 (left), 3 (right), 4 (left), 5 (right),
6 (left), 7 (right), 8 (left), 9 (right)...
10 (right left), 11 (right right), 12 (right left)...
it's like that game children play,
they draw a checkers board with chalk,
squares the size of gifted feet missing tango,
schematic looks something like this:
                            1
                   2               3
                            4
                   5               6
                            7
                            8
   ­                9                10
(almost the tree of kabbalah),
so you throw a pebble onto a number
and then do a one legged kangaroo on
1, 4, 7 and 8... but numbers 2 and 3,
5 and 6, 9 and 10 you do the two-legged stomp,
pick the pebble up, and do the reverse as mentioned...
girls loved playing this game when young,
apart from the indoor game of surgeons with
asexual dolls of artificial *** and third party donors,
very horrid that game of dolls,
hide & seek was the boys' invention,
basically anything with running and camouflage
involved, be it shadow, be it anything...
i did skip like a boxer with the skipping ropes,
didn't become a boxer though...
so girls invented the profession of boxing...
behind every tyrant there's a harem of sadists...
i like this feminism they're shoving at us...
i'm one of the last boys to go to university,
it ended circa 2010... now about 60K more *******
fathom the upper tiers of psychology,
education and what not...
mathematics is still a male orientation,
no bullshitting, just: wrong wrong wrong, remainder.
it was an article in the newspaper, what can i do,
censor myself? along with the new elements
discovered, so unstable they live like *******
***** in a petrie dish the length of a male ******:
funky pumpy did all the work, mission impossible
message reads: DISPOSE OF. husband material?
tick. drinker? no no. it's like al capote's time era,
drink the problem... GUNS DON'T **** PEOPLE,
PEOPLE **** PEOPLE. you trying to make me
supermalt or something? all the black kids drank that;
white boys milked the cow from a pint bottle of milk,
ones turned into sprinters... the others turned
into dolphins. that's what i don't get about evolution
attacking theology and undermining itself
from the realm of humanities... you know black
olympic swimmers sink in the pool... clearly
i didn't bleach my skin in arabia going north...
i was a sea monkey! honest to god... the fat in me
makes me float... origins of non-aquatic monkey
sinks in blue water, a dollop of brown...
or that english post-colonial joke about another
member state of the union... you know any good
californian joke about new englanders?
an uninhibited english man (with poor taste in
tailoring) glorifies this fact: per capita,
poland is the only country with each household
having a toilet for each member of the household...
that's why they exported so many polish plumbers
to england!
when i was only but a child and i seemed to have
forgotten being one, when
i got a shock after my ****** hair / beard envy disappeared
and felt no ***** envy, and when i heard being
described as a man... i didn't write any st. paul
*******... so i delved on it...
and remembered my favourite movie from childhood
and the actors i wanted to speak the truth as:
favourite film - le bossu, swash & buckle, cut & ******
adventure starring jean marais (based on a novel
by paul feval)... and of course the three musketeers,
with richard chamberlain and oliver reed...
i so wanted to be the shogun that was chamberlain,
the philandering priest turned musketeer...
lo and behold... i ended up as athos...
not that i mind... but that time period captured
my imagination, as a child of decaying communism
in a satellite state of the soviets... the rule of louis xiv,
and the intrigue of cardinal richelieu...
i wanted to be there! just sniffing up the gun powder!
alas... not to be.
so today i braced myself for no donning an elaborate
hat with peacock feathers and remembering the yore
days of chivalry... walking the grey pavement and grey
houses with a grey sky above... if only the houses
were coloured like the houses of st. petersburg...
if only... and in the hospital after almost breaking
my index finger i did a bit of solo c.b.t. (cognitive
behavioural therapy), i sat in silence, feet not in turkish
or buddhist akimbo but like nailed to a cross,
hands crossed... in this house of pain and legal morphine
addiction, in the orthopedic ward... just sat...
eyes closed... and couldn't conjure any thought...
just nothing... is that a problem for the c.b.t. practices?
i bet it is... what sort of behavioural problems
can arise from not thinking? running a marathon?
driving a car? flying an aeroplane? exponential
flamboyance of memory brought to the fore in an examination?
loads* of examples!
i walked with this somali woman after someone misdirected her
to get to the hospital...
but the gift of all gifts came to seal the day complete
(after not finding lamb kidneys at the supermarket
for a steak and kidney pie)
was next to an islamic learning centre...
three guys ahead on my path, two talking,
one running from one edge width of the pavement
to the other, jumping on something...
he was about to rush back onto the stone
then he stuck his hand out...
his hand warmer than my heart, my hand colder
than his brain yet to be indoctrinated,
he extended it looking me in the eye and i into his,
this little ****** of about 6 or 7 too shy to talk,
his warm hand no bigger than my pinky, ring and middle
finger did a sort of high-five with me...
i guess one of my paediatric theories came true
came the high five.

Zero One and modern blight
Travel at the speed of light.

We wondered on the Wandering Jew,
Or, in lieu,
Orthon, Urian or Lilitu.

We trepanned our empty skulls,
Searched our humours,
Were touched by Rulers!

Now troubling symptoms of want and need,
Have blighted growth of yesterseed.

Patient Zero left no lead.

East fingered West
(and vice versa)
Was Ireland really the cause of cholera?
Did Blacks languish in Tuskegee squalor?
We christened Mary, but drank the water.
Fracked Incubus and Succubus
From son and daughter.

Patient Zero left the slaughter.

We deprived women of their tea
To cure wandering womb hysteriae.
Deviances and leaking lesions
Were headwaters of women's *****.

Patient Zero has no season.

The barber sensed it might be smell,
So our widened streets became a sulfurous hell.
And wastelands swelled
Where curled cats dwelled.
(no talk of Michelangelo)

                                         II

Our children's blight has a techno name,
Like the rose, IT smells the same.
With zero tolerance I lay blame
On screens and phones and video games.

The world wide box stores flipped their lids,
Touching all who crawl the social grids;
From the base of Mammon's pyramid.

Now Jake believes he's a gangsta dude
Since posting whatever on You Tube.
Nothing to gain, nothing to lose:
No services rendered but expects what's due.

Inflated egos are a system symptom,
Clearing firewalls, reaching children.

Patient Zero is no phantom.

There is no tale of rat or flea
As cause of lost immunity.
There is no open sore to fester,
The Selfie is the X-ray picture.

Patient Zero is so much quicker.

In our gel of techno bliss,
On our elliptic petrie dish,
Bathed in more than we could wish,
Patient Zero will finish,
And with that whimper
All vanish.

Ok

Ok before,

Better with.

But I don't know that I'll ever be Ok after...

So much put into such a temporary thing.

And now I'm left to think about what was,

And to fail repeatedly at trying to heal

I don't think I will ever be Ok... again.

I recently went through a spell
When I had one minor and two major operations
In rather quick succession
One of the consequences of this was
That I didn't see my grandkids for months on end
Primary schools being, as they are
The Petrie dishes for all human disease
So, it was decided that as I was either waiting for
Or recovering from surgery
To keep them away from me
Until I was in the clear
And when I was in the clear
I was soooo glad to see four of them
The youngest of my grandkids
Are twin boys, far from identical
And at this time they were about six
One standing a head taller than the other
And at seperate points in the day
Independant of each other
Each twin said the same thing
"Grampy, I  thought you were allergic to kids."
And to each I gave the same reply
Once I stopped laughing
"Ah well, sometimes it's better than others."
I can see the picture now
"Mummy, why can't we see Grampy?"
Jenny, doing a thousand other things
And no time for explanations
"Grampy's allergic to kids!"

                                              By Phil Roberts

Teenage Love is Stupid
And that’s coming from me. 

A 16 year old, hopeless romantic 

And I know a lot of you wont agree 
unless you’re at least 23 

But hear me out, pretty please?

See we go through life begging

to find the one that makes our life worth living 

and then we think we find them.

We promise that we’ll be there

and we could never find another. 

“I love you”
we always say, to our teenaged lover 

And then one day its just not true anymore. 

You pack your bags and out the door. 
There goes number 1. 

See as teenagers we fall in love for fun 

we dont know this at first
but trust me its true 

We fantasize about about
finding that one 
person
that we can accurately compare to the sun 

and then ****
with the sound of a gun 

runs
all of our feelings, 
away from us.

Please dont misunderstand what I’m trying to say

I do not believe teenagers dont know what love is, 

I simply do not believe we truly kno what it feels like.

In which case we spend all of this time devoting our hearts
and minds 

to this person
that we swear we’re so lucky to find

and
after a couple months everything just
 stops 
and feelings are nowhere to be found 

Hearts are broken
and we dive back into the crowd 

to find our next
“one true love”

Mixed Emotions

Pt. 1
It's not your fault

I'm sorry.  

I wake up every morning with a hope of death some time throughout the day.
I go to bed at night with dreams of never waking.
I walk across the street at night in black clothing
Without enough care to check for oncoming traffic,
So in the case there is someone coming,
I don't have to end my life with the knowledge that I did it on purpose...
I just set up the perfect accident.

Pt. 2
I want to fall in love again.
The way I did with you.
I want to fall in love so deeply that I haven't had a clue
about the world around me and the things that others do.
I want to fall in love again
I want to feel it true
I want to fall in love so that the greys can turn to blue
and all things pertain to you
and all my problems minuscule,
because I've shard my life with you
I want to fall in love again
But I can't replace my you.

Blue
And White
Much like my mood
But sometimes Grey
And Black
That's what they say
At least
See the Sky is a funny thing
For its one of those things thats Constantly changing
One of those things That is very misleading
Much like a word
For words can mean many things, as the sky can
And if you dont understand how the word is put together
Then you will never be able to see the big picture
And if you dont understand what the Sky is saying
Then you wont be able to tell if the weather is rainy
So with that I tell you to be careful
You see the sky is quite touchy
And one false word may create a bigger storm than you can handle.

Ironic isnt it?

how a writer could say 'words can only mean so much.'

As a writer you understand what words could truly mean.

the passion,

the sadness,

anger,

joy,

love.

And yet so easily could a writer lie.

Think about it though, isnt it so perfect?

Creating a story out of real life?

And a good writer could really cover their tracks

their lies would be so drawn out and intricate, there's no way they just made it up...

Right?

Tears bring me here
where you don't care
aren't even here really

Fester, I fester here
in this white petrie
as you sniff nothing

And I'm angry at  you
say your perspicacity
must be poor and failing

not the artlessness of this
effort at resurrection whilst
lonliness' crooked smile reigns