Voilà

Voilà
     by Cam M. Roberts


"With those unseeing eyes I so begged when alive to look at me."
     — Samuel Beckett, ...but the clouds...


I
A Pledge 
is a benefit 
of the doubt 
under the condition 
of a dream 
as contagious 
as Terror Logic —

It sifts 
through us 
as if 
conduits
still 
awaiting 
some consensus 
in reciprocal 
wilderness.


II
Transference 
is a kind of catharsis 
delivered to the wrong audience:
So keep on raving, 
then survey 
your conspirators
because everyone's 
a Cult Leader
in this country.
 
Phallic contrails 
lacerate the sky —
Walls hood our bane.

How are we actually kindred spirits 
in our virtual world of zeitgeists? 
Are we distinct by subverted limits 
when we ourselves are poltergeists?


III
In view of the burning evening,
this atmosphere turns to grey
as does the time we share together, 
our cigarette silence becomes 
more sensitive by the second:
Underscoring of echoic vespers 
by melancholic starling whispers —

Until darkening
spires on yonder
horizon steep
can no longer
be seen
out of memory - 
Nightfall snatches
it all, under 
a polished claw
half-unsheathed 
the waxing moon.

All withholds the mind's return
in shrouds of ghost-light, now
half-blind, half-holy. So how
will our final tableau recur?

All that is beautiful 
catches the Light 
you allowed yourself 
to shine upon —



© CMR, 2014

Mornings at Rosedale

by Cam M. Roberts

Mikhail Baryshnikov in Samuel Beckett’s Act Without Words II

(for Mackenzie Finnegan)

How many times have you stirred me
from my slumber in the uncouth mornings
as you were on your way out the door to teach
the kindergartners what this world has to offer?

You must’ve discovered me
on one of the promiscuous couches,
or thereupon the unforgiving floor,
surrendered to my limits
or in my asceticism,
I had no pillow, no stone,
though I kept my fear
of falling off of beds.
My body stayed contorted orderly
like a crippled strand
of something still worth having,
all six feet of me under
my rainbow blanket from Mexico
now rendered thus: a cocoon –
wherein I ruminated in REM cycles
with hopes of consecrating
an eternal metamorphosis.

You sounded-off startling
voices I never knew you possessed,
in dark deep resonant registers,
syncopated and cadenced commands
with monosyllabic words,
first a matriarch, then a sergeant, and so on…

Time to wake up
Class starts at eight
Come on, sit up
You will be late

I’m recalled to life
this very instant
out of dreams
out of comas

The front door would close, soberingly.
Soon after, the shutting of a car door,
then the engine starting,
and you driving away.

And, the world would go on
with
or without
me.

© CMR, 2013

No Exodus

by Cam M. Roberts

Samuel Beckett’s Rough for Theatre I from the Beckett on Film collection.

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 or 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 salvation nor damnation.    

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

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

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

Siren

by Cam M. Roberts

Almost like a Beckettian Muse, the latterday Billie Whitelaw,
within a corridor of spectral light wherein May paces metronomic nine seconds at length,
spiraling inward, clockwork, ritual of no, unbecoming to Amy,
an anagram, and so she unmakes and negates herself,
unravels as lights minimize out of their belated installations, how her afterimage hovers,
affixed within darkness, that undoubtedly absent form, now completely unseen,
then returns as some galvanized inconceivable presence,
the inimical vastitudes of darkness with reference to the Void,
empty hole in shut blackness,
the Footfalls ringing louder in silence no nearer in distance
than its resounding ambient paths she perpetually overlaps,
as echos fail to be born from the unknown source,
so instead these yonder voices
unnerve us & disquiet the rest into our Momento Mori… and we pass…

© CMR, 2012