No Exodus

by Cam M. Roberts

Samuel Beckett’s Rough For Theatre I from the ‘Beckett on Film’ collection.  Video found here.

They say when an innocent victim of circumstance
is taken away from the earth,
that the state of injustice
will rot through the tangle of sins,
becoming inextricable from the on-setting 
force which put all the evil into motion -
This is not to say original sin
is to blame, but a nostalgic god,
who constantly bears witness
to the myths & follies petrifying
through man, solid stone to core, no longer
a mere stain where the blood can freshen
the eternal wounds, but drawn inward
toward the core,
like Cain,
like Moses,
like a slow crippling
corruption that hardens
hearts into exile
like a certain blindness where spirits
glaze over the eyes like two ghostly cataracts -
History repeats itself,
over and over,
they say they’ve seen
none too little change, a fool’s glimmer
of hope remains wherein none
declare, question, or exclaim:
I told you so, I saw it coming, but no one ever listened, no one was there.  

Others will forever whisper like otherworldly hosts
that your mean streak is too much for them to bear -
Don’t let the fuckers get you down.  
You must love them at a distance like Francis Bacon and David Lynch,
just practice your loving detachment.  Listen, you must tell yourself
plenty of things, at times lie if you have to.  
We two, the both of us are more than privy
to the viler silences made impermeable
by four walls,
little light,
and idle quiet.  

I’ve no altar to lay, no plinth
to agitprop
my propagations from so as to shout
throughout the hollow hills of this nation:
I told you so is neither damnation nor salvation.    

I carried my sorrow & shame to fruition
whereby as grey evenings malingered to nothingness and my love
did fleet through my fingers like dry smoke,
brandishing my sanity like a trophy of the foe
vanquished, then slung thereupon the eyes of others,
bereft as a high priest amongst heathens…
slung, slung, unrelenting pain, strange dust
converging up as if it were slung like a raggedy
rising fuck in cloudy clots of dirt undulating skyward
from the soiled earth.

Though this be a travesty, overwhelming to us all -
It be not insufferable.  
Come.

Let’s at least pretend -
Imagine you are Sisyphus, and I am Prometheus.
There’s only one rock
befallen us -

 

© CMR, 2013

The Spectacular Origin of Theatre

by Cam M. Roberts

(for Lisa Weller)

When you accost
the sheerness of the garb
which sprawls those surfaces
of privacy –  
the bodily dressing –  
You are nuanced no more
in the guise of gaudy design. 
 
You pull the stitches taut,
You fit into it,
Neither resembling Atwood’s accusation:
 
            You fit into me
            like a hook into an eye
 
            a fish hook
            an open eye *
 
Thus you fit into it
As if
Some magical flaw,
Flocking the prenatal womb
Of whence you came.
 
The thread reinforced,
Crossed, looped over
And under and again
And again and so on
And so forth –
Like the memory
Of an ocean wave,
Aquatic servitude
To pummeling amnesia.
 
Yes, actors, you are privileged
To stand still
While sizing up your
Anatomical dimensions
And your vanity’s ego. 
 
You must be calm,
stop spreading, look up,
straight, hang that up,
you’re late, you’ve lost
weight, fold along the crease,
not water-based, use the grease
paint, pants up to your waist,
wear a slip for heaven’s sake.
No, you’ll break it, that costs
Money kid, dammit, I’m tired,
I’m sick, I’m through
With this fucking bullshit!
 
As a rendering, all that’s needed
Is for the actor to be – to act, so to speak –
Like a blank inanimate canvas
To essentially have the imagined creation
Sketched ebulliently upon the fabric. 
Displayed like the synapses
Rapid-fire, shooting sparks onto
The page, the pistons pumping
Through the tight twitch.
The thundering spindle
Weaving a metronome of fibers
From the sewing machine –
Giving birth to genius
Looming textile opuses
From the needling wand;
The nimble hot and eroded
On the thumb –
 
I am the best you’ll ever have
Child, remember that,
I’m the leaves from the Garden of Eden
You snatched from the tree
To hide your body
You discovered;
A rather reluctant exhibitionist – woe is you -
Even the most corrupt eyes can shut to cover the rest of you:
Afterwards, your indulgences
At which you devoured the apple
Hooking your teeth into God’s eye;
Then God decided you were
Imperfect, Unfit, Unclean.
Thus, the mere sight
Of your naked bodies became
The barbed hooks
Impaling the bulging tight
Bloodshot eyes of yourself
And the other,
They’re all Screaming in horror, in horror –
 
This element is coded like blood
Sifting through the veins
Upon the zip, out of the buttoning up,
The tying of laces, the fastening of belts,
The brushing of lent, the collar adjusting
To your neck like a serpentine noose –
 
You are hidden and vanity takes you
To the necessity of circumstance,
A creation from the centre of the prophetic
Brain of which is born boldly
With posture rectified
And nuance rusticated
From the core of conceptual
Bliss; the dwelling space
Of enigma.
 
The glow commences as if
An impatient daybreak
Tore back and opened
The curtains of clouds
And melancholic falling night. 
The stagnant veal shorn off
In such frantic entropy.
 
The intangible thinking,
Stands incarnate
Stunning the perceptual
In-ward look –
 
A welcomed delusion,
A sideward step in another direction –
Whether shoes, worlds, lights, speeches, color of hues.
The costume is the thing – 

And you are not you. 

 

© CMR, 2013

Lesser Evil

by Cam M. Roberts

In moments such as these, it all seems as obvious
as the weight which is still
burning but never resorts to ash,
It envelops me in solitude, and dwells
within my skull: I hang my head further
with every footfall.  

Is it the same heaviness of mind
which from the onset of its wild impending
is astounded by the truth
of things, unfolding themselves
into mere points-of-departure or access-holes
for the sake of man and his vanity, a place
kept in illusion where no mistake is made? – The visage
of happiness cast upon a concrete wall is now unlit by its former light,
When it’s gone, guilt arrives, and with emphasis.

The world will appear
lost, inimical, bereft, and vast in waywardness.

One stays ill-acquainted with an already alienated world.

The flip-side of release
is collapse, not peace.
It’s the letting loose 
as disaster is happening, hinges begin
to break off
from their own scaffolding,
one intake of breath splays another,
crippling the metaphors
from both hemispheres of the brain.  

It’s quite spectacular,  
and I’m still learning as I always will 
the distinctions of fear and wisdom. 

 

© CMR, 2013

Keep the Strange Light

by Cam M. Roberts

Remembrance of Things Past           by Marcel Proust  |  Cover Illustration by Andrzej Klimowski

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Your face, within a certain oblong
Distance, is catalyzed by a curtained dimness
of hooded light,
Seeming in a way cloistered
like an apprehended simile
or one too many slurs which
expose the wreckage of our words
as they cannot be salvaged
by their having, and the truth
has yet to be reconciled from our mutual desire
to break the chains which bind us in silence.

All things are let go in the grand scheme,
Even one’s own blood
is let,
let go,
blood-letting some call it –
 
It’s the healing that matters.
Imagine
healing as the mimetic image
of unspun or rewound:
A flip-book being flipped in reverse.
Blood being un-let, taken back, carried into, returned
within the inside of the veins. 
 
I see her flowers with their dishonest air,
They implicate the atmosphere in this quiet room.
It is a gravelly night, and our moods are now in explication.
 
Blooming inward
as if we were – Together –
being slowly
euthanized
over this one
flicker of life
like a wish
we’d been granted,
or a sanction
we’d been sentenced
to suffer -
 
Without a trace of shame
nor any shred of hesitation,
The world is lensed in clarity.
And so, from the lack of annoyance,
I allow you to astonish
the very life
From my eyes
as opposed to a common avoidance
where I set this head
like the sun behind the larches,
and when all things
absolve to the most
minimum light,
the night falls,
and I crouch
both eyes
downward
in surrender. 
 
I bear up my guilt in dreams
to where
it would beat the very breath
from these ragged lungs. 
 
If there’s a god, then to her I prayed
in a sudden flash, and with such a violence
where I would imagine flowers in their wrath,
And question how by day they go on ignored
to the point of being, at times, stomped upon –
 
The Amen
resembled
the last bit of dirt
recovering the small abscess
of earth we’d exhumed
in hopes of resurrecting
what was once there,
a garden nestled by wilderness:
A collaboration of our own heaven
Which would surround us
as we excelled
in the art of reassembling
everything else –

 

 

© CMR, 2013

Requiems in Fallout

by Cam M. Roberts

Billie Whitelaw as Mouth in Samuel Beckett’s ‘Not I’

 

 

 

 

 

 

I
Spread against the sheets
dark of heavy thoughts lingering
in open wafts –
Pitch shrouds of funeral
veils closing near the torment
of awaking at the brink
shutting of eyelids
on the face
blink
Again.
 
II
Black
sufficing to see
the convection
blood boil within
the concealed ball;
Pressure cooking
coal to diamond
dust like splitting out
of the cocoon born
to devour the air
as some plume
of beauty
too marvelous
to witness
it
Explodes.
 
III
The millionth cigarette crushed
on crystalline trays
burning through to what is protected
underneath.  Pupil perfect hole
in the glassen marble
singes of craters periphery
the moment smoke clears
from engulfing
the bombs
going off
the lights
going out
the trees
going down
the limbs
laid out like
collected horrors
while the awful smile
spreads its euphemism
thinking to itself
this is one big
glorious
Disintegration –  

IV
Insufferable wreckage
of words, into fragmentation hanging
within a formless abattoir now emptied 
of its meaning, a vow of nightmares from
the mausoleum of the mouth, a desolate dwelling 
inhabited by belatedness on a sometimes quiet hill,
if and only if it were a receptacle
ever still. 

V
Some silences
are absolute in their sovereignty. 

 

 

© CMR, 2013

Perish

by Cam M. Roberts

Act accordingly… was all he spoke,
after adding without condolence, We all are.

She’s on her way out with the departed.

Through a door.
With the trash.
Toward some final resting place.

Love departs us all
onward to catastrophe
as do our dearly beloved
whose fall must live in tragedy.

 

© CMR, 2013

Walking

by Cam M. Roberts

Am I to say this
so it be colloquial, 
or must I assent to mistake
myself with an asserted lyric,
a semantic twist which will distort
the essential image, or a turn of phrase
that may very well placate
the strangest crowd
with planar, perhaps
flat sensibilities?

How’s that for a disclaimer?
He is known to ask superfluous questions.

You know you’re in for either a real treat
or a long, tiresome ride
when you hear
the phrase:
Walk with Me -
sandwiched between two sets of ellipses -

Spoken more with the half-furrowed eyes
than with the voice made feeble on purpose.  
In most cases, it bespeaks:
as a matter of urgency
or
let me be perfectly understood.
 
This walk wherein you sense the idea of lingering -
Within such a moment, you feel
as though you’ve forever
lost an invaluable friend
to the evils of separation,
even when
they’re right beside you:
Walking.  

[The shadow of the axe
sways in the foreboding gallows.]

It strangles your will to express yourself,
and what is Love without expression? 

I remember
the most uplifting note
I’ve ever received on a poem,
It is written on the very margin,
under the final stanza,
in purple ink: 

A wonderful,
beautiful poem.
You get at nature 
in a very gentle
way, like it was a 
dog you found abused
and so took it in.  

 

© CMR, 2013