Until Time Breaks

by Cam M. Roberts

Time drools out of the hourglass
like gritty spit stuck
with stubbornness, a disrespect
of one’s misery.
I felt this way soon after
Reading All That Fall,
a Beckettian radio-play.

These hands dig for morning
While my mind still dwells
In Gerontion and No Man’s Land –
I now bear down and plunge
The pipe dreams of the happily ever after.
My private utopia is the quintessence of copper –
The wet dream world of a wishing well –

Here lies my reality as of late:
A cauldron of macabre mornings,
thickening their viscosity
in a stagnancy of myopia and catatonic stares
like the purgatorial Endgame negated of its ending.

There is such a thing as
Being too sober to think without feeling –
A hangover for instance, the departure
of not knowing the difference
while watching the perpetual travesty
that is the news media.
Imagine the first few verses
of “Sunday Morning Coming Down”
A washed-up zone more volatile than nostalgia –
It’s like a liquid metal:
Mercury, its commonplace, Quick Silver –
Or the Messenger who hesitates.

 

© CMR, 2012

Suffer the Self

by Cam M. Roberts

All I’ve ever learned through breathing
are the limits to walking on land
as are the parameters of water and wind.
Striding along the crashing waves
with the tide pulling my coattails
in some old-fashioned hope
that I will submit to embrace
as it chokes the air out of my every follicle:
Those frothing bubbles impaling the surface,
O’ that muffled cry of panic
Released as gaseous orbs
Shuffling towards the bosom of sky.
That fear of splitting into foam
is closer to the brink than the scuttle
of twitching limbs
drowning and lost:

I wish to never be
What keeps me alive –

I cannot say what my purpose seems.
It only occurs as I lay dreaming of a new birth
through every savage eon of elements.

And like Eliot, I ponder
Do I dare… Do I dare…

Should I simply sink to the depths
Of my memory
When the descending darkness
Shrouds my eyes
Like a veil, a stigmata?
The marriage of time and absence
Strikes the hours of daybreak,

And I realize my solitude
In this unkempt bed.

And is it so tragic
That I should forget
The reveries and visions,
Or that I could care less
that every time
When I awaken
… that moment…
The threshold of firmament
from earth to heaven,
That I should sink through
the ocean floor,

And then I wonder if a gargled
scream would do me good.

I look up
From the sink
And stare harshly
into the mirror like some
wounded animal in absolution,
And say without a shred of evidence
That I am present, or in control of my wits:
Endure, just endure, stay still and silent, and endure…

I had no nightmares on that night, and slept quite profoundly.

 

© CMR, 2012