Things get broken
Hearts
Minds
It's no-one's fault
It never is
Not really
Butter fingers and distraction
Without malice or forethought
Things
Like hearts and minds
Slip
And shatter on hard contact with reality

                                By Phil Roberts

I hammered some words
Out from the quarry of my brain
They fell around in shards;
Some like boulders,
some like rocks and rubble
I picked them up one by one.
Block on block, I piled them up
Thinking I could build a ‘pleasure dome’

But,
     When it was time for the workman
      To marvel over the beauty and wonder
      Of his dream creation  
      His masonry tumbled down
      Like sand castles built
      By little hands on sea strands
      Or dunes of quicksand sliding down

I have lost count of the times,
This has happened before.
Now that I stay resigned,
Amid a heap of debris

Is there any use feeling remorse?

Like Nero fiddled on his harp
When Rome was burning
I sit on this pile of wreck
Piping my thoughts away
In the cusp between victory and defeat
Exacting as much ecstasy as I can
Before the truth looms large
In all its stark nakedness!

I see the darkness in the world
and stare into the corners of its ugly truths
and witness the obscenely criminal neglect
of our own humanity
I hear the silent echoes escaping the abyss
from the pleas of the lost and the lonely and the desperate
and I recognize my own voice among them

I feel the fear of love being lost and thrown away and ignored

And I hurt and I weep and I worry

But I do not turn away
not from the darkness
or the ugly truths
or the criminal neglect

I break the silence and scream
to the lost
and the lonely
and the desperate

And I reach my hand to love
for I will not let it get lost
or be thrown away
or ignored
and i will not let it die in fear

For without love
the world would be swallowed by darkness
consumed by its ugly truths
crumble from its own neglect

but with love
we can survive the darkness
sink to the bottom
and rise back out of the abyss
help the lost and the lonely
and the desperate and our selves

and we can hurt for love
and we can weep for love
and have no need to worry

How I enjoy these lost late nights playing poet under moonlight.
Each word a celebration of my wit and confusion. I am blessed by the fathers and mothers of my youth whom all knew as poets to, from Dickenson on to Poe that shaped my love and helped me grow. This is as it always was a written remembrance in love. To every poem and every story thank you for your radiant glory.

-2011

The nature of war blooms bullets and bombs
in battlefields of glory
that quickly turn into gardens of grief
rained down upon with the blood of innocence
lost to hate fueled by years of violence breeding violence
and the coffins fall in place as the body count marches on
and spit shine the corpse for the beautiful parade
for the heroes of war and the soldiers of peace
who sleep with the horrors of what they've seen
and the horrors of what they've done
tucked away tight and safe
inside name brand body bags and precisely folded flags
and what victory can be seen
in the tears of a mothers heart
or the pride in a fathers eyes
and the nature of war blooms on
as the cannons keep roaring
and the political speakers keep up
the rhetoric of violent ballets of misinformation
to keep the war machine grinding
the bones of new enemies
with the same old perpetuated propaganda
to keep the masses foaming at the mouths
to dress up in uniforms of legalized ******
and the casual lie
of the freedom everyone is fighting for
and it's the iron fist that controls the land of the free
and it's the strong arm of might
making everything alright with the nature of war