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

Since

by Cam M. Roberts

A backed up septic-tank
my Father was, so full of shit,
such an abundance burst
from his every orifice, call it
his mere offending presence – 

His drainage ditch of voice
from the foulest bowels
of his soul, blown out, riveted,
searing geyser of words,
bitch burning – 

Living under a bridge, my Father
did – The bridge is now haunted,
my Father even when alive
was like a ghost, invisible
or absent:

I cannot tell the difference.

 

© CMR, 2013

Reject This

by Cam M. Roberts

As it is awoken from the nothing
to the imperative end-all-be-all,
it is verily spoken in various forms: No.

Rejection,
Lordy, irony, come to think of it, rejection
has no valence to what it evokes, not the slightest convergence
from trigger to subsequent heap, like a crack in the suction:
It embraces the cast of regret and the mold of ignorance.
A little bit is always too much and it’s never used
in the same breath as enough.
It’s barely ignored, but instead, acknowledged, it seems,
by all of creation, only regretted a bit
from the ignorance of what was unknown at the time –

Through the hole in the air, you hear it despairingly:
On earth as it is in heaven, within the Kingdom
whereas a new hell is made anew,
You can hear it in the silence, the faint sounds
of the passing day, the noise a house
makes throughout the night, be it the flocks
of over-populated geese shitting on windshields,
or the makeshift colony of fire-ants
digging deeper in the earthen ritual.

An afterthought invoking empty consolations
from the masses, “what a bunch of motherfuckers,”
You think.  A horde of bless your hearts, crossed fingers
stiff behind exo-skeletal shells of fool’s gold fakery, as if they
were a shit-house baker of insects, a worm-religion to drive them home
minus their dogmatic backbones, only fatty-acids
churning in their varicose thoracic veins, biting down
thereon the bottom lip, and the vice-grip pliers
far from being any semblance to the jaws of life –

Evidenced in alienation & distance,
your testimonies give worship to the darkening days – Still becoming,
But the glimmers of hope come when the light commences at dawn,
staring you down like some strange voyeur fascinated by your grief.

 

© CMR, 2013

Plotinus & The Whale

by Cam M. Roberts

“The philosophy of Plotinus has always exerted a peculiar fascination upon those
whose discontent with things as they are has led them to seek the realities behind
what they took to be merely the appearances of the sense.”

– Joseph Katz, The philosophy of Plotinus, p. vii

A sort of undeserving ebullience one feels
wandering about in darkness, away and alone,
and a slight subsequent inkling
of the dawn’s disillusionment, which is not
so much sensed as it is unnerving,
It occurs right before the light of day barges over
this far-flung panorama of land too jagged and scraggly
to consider an ideal horizon, as if
the one white-knuckled within your mind’s eye
is a likely possibility for the real rising sun you’ll never
bust, or ever outrun.

He whispered to his nightly afterthoughts:
Save your grief for what counts.  

And so, the light pierced the dying darkness
like a hook of hyperbole, an insufficient rust-raped
word infected with the mist of irreverence –

Imagine then, a different word:
Harpoon –
To which must come, “Captain Ahab
dreams of violence” singing in my head,
at times, I’ve no self-discipline –

I say this now with such vehemence
because I wonder if a voice awoke this
within him,
or if it were the silence he might find
being swallowed by a whale
in the stomach of the seven seas.

 

© CMR, 2013