“last night, for the first time I baked confections sprinkled with salt and grains” (three books)

we never know.

and worse for us that
thinking that we do.
-that is when the
iron falls…

i watch old friends grow
comfortable as cities
shrink to rough oil scene
-the quest recedes to
beach routine.

and my friends are sharp,
they cut to remind my
calm the place to find me,

beside Miss Morphine
lying now where the blade
no longer signifies
-where the air we
breathe is cancer.

speak to me in seven days
and I am told to go
or stay, seven steps
to heaven’s nay as
all this life I danced with
8…
and 8 will bring the answer
then, open the un-earthen gate
where news supplanted
by dancers.

“Pete, impale me now.”
it says…
the God inside the fox
and hound.

purple flower

it’s what I see
the concrete on fire
the streets of addiction
the holes in the colon
an ocean of glass
and volcanic, and manic
the power
depression
impression of mine;

held back by
broken bones
and wrenched neck
as I stop
and stoop
to pick and hand
her one small
purple flower
-my first baby
daughter.

while leaning against
it to
keep it behind me

hypodermic boulevard

juggling ice with
buttered hands
it’s how we
it’s what we do
because

in traffic, I
rode behind one slow
lamming through the
gnats like silent dull bangs
his tail to my
nose as he drives too slow

i lay back smoking it
and I forget for a second, the
rats and race and cracked dead
slate turtle shells and drift
away into the wisps of mallows seed
and
the one behind me makes me push.
rear view and double yellow left
and isn't that how we
do isn't that what we are
are?
Just hate and push the one
in front of us and hate and block
the one in back of us who would
but for some peering tasteless gas
lay waste and cancel
the one in front

and isn't that just what we do?
juggling butter in
frozen marshland
hands in wasteland
mind in chains
the continuing host for
the evolution of the viruses

juggling ice-brain waste caves
in spent sharp rigs, and birthday cake cans
and cigarettes.
hypodermic boulevard and the
late
late
shock./ the
setting sequined supper of
the sixth great extinction.

standing behind me; some thing
pushes me to push the
thing in front of me
and that is what a
human does to life.
what we do, we are.

us are

stood
beside the mailbox by
the big little road


horns blown
my salute extended
going about our business.

when i'm out there
on it barreling
in the Cadillac
issuing the fuck yous
and flashing lights


it's not right.


none of it is
us
are.

just in the nature of this.


-everyone with somewhere
to beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee,
and nothing.

(c) 2014 peter graves roberts

"The Hog Island Sheep"

saturday outer banks minute:
(5/17/14)
"Pirates were DICKS, and the Hog Island Sheep"

so yeah, lot's of you like to see the pirate movies with the swashbuckling hottie-mens like JD and Keith...but have you ever really learned the history behind these murderous, slave-trading daft cuntz?
*only redeeming quality up front...they were a fair bunch among themselves, they had 'shipboard articles' entitling all aboard an even split of the 'booty', as it were, and a prototypical democratic model for doing business, including what you might equate to worker's compensation.


-but they were dicks. imagine a bunch of asshole gang members (the 16th-17th century Brits) that rule an area so vast that they can't control it...or, POLICE IT. so they give authority to a bunch of lawless, greedy bastards to board and/or blow up vessels from the other gang (mainly 16th-17th century Spanish) and then take all the 'treasure' aboard for themselves. sounds cool huh? -from that 1950's 'murican male perspective'.
then, after the QUEEN told them to stop once the war ended and SHE signed a treaty with the other gang, the Privateers, or Pirates kept on robbing, looting, burning, raping and murdering. When caught, they would say ." oh...but i am sorry" and be given a governorship somewhere in the caribbean on some sugar plantation or the like. they don't celebrate Chris Columbine or Spicy Rum Capt. Morgan in Jamaica, all my marley and weed loving friends...they call them come-bust-us and pirate morgan...remember the dying slave that first discovered rum in a fermented sugar cane juice puddle, delirious and without the fear of a bludgeoned reprisal from his well paid task master the next time you step up to the bar at the brewin' station and order a captain and coke...dancing to some mid-western reggae cover band. yeah mon...yer jammin'.


so to recap. pirates were dicks. don't dress your kids as pirates. unless you wanna remain, or if vacationing, be like the naturals and the transplants here...and just self medicate, and look the other way. remind yourself that you are in the best place on earth, perfect weather, colorful, fruity cocktails, and sugar-poison slurping slaves. forget the dying souls all around, calling out in the night...the fell trees and smashed reptiles; the road-rot of small bandits and marsupials.


just stare out at that blue lie...keep a firm grip on that sweating mexican glass and your toes snuggled in the warmth of a ground mountain that during the Archean Eon, believed that it too would stand forever. it didn't and you won't. there is a good and bad news type of living here...we use yoga and shaman and western hippies doped on chinese meds and needles and billboards and jazzy commercials to remind ourselves that we love it, but we know that we live under two possible mothers. one, the finest would be the death by tempest, a cat five hurricane to slam into the southern tail of us and chew up the sound, north by northeast, ripping everything on either side like a saw-blade while the heavier wind and spin-off cyclones pummels the glorious beachhead into something unrecognizable to anyone thereafter. the second death is the slow sinking. nobody alive today will have to deal with it really...our grand-kids will, but nobody cares that the slow and steady rise of the ocean will eventually turn this extended spit into another buried treasure. The evidence of our folly and the genius of our paleo-ancestry will once again become the stuff of legend; meanwhile, we remain...grazing on the seasonal leavings like the Hog Island Sheep.

(c)2014 pgr

the service of the grave

an old
and dear friend
stands outside today
during the service
of the grave.

i have stood
on line
as well-
twenty-four hours
removed from my
jamaican mountain peak,
watching as my moon sank
into the dark and
stars behind me
and another sun raised
red and fuchsia
over that still
blue Carib sea.

a drunken flight or two
and there I was;
next to my departed
in the spitting rains
of February,
just like him today.

a cold fucking mother
this is.
-pale blue wisps of sky
and I hate you
blown against clean
and shaven cheeks.

no saving grace
for days like these
-save the thought
that one amongst
will never see this
pane again.

i stand beneath my
live oak

leaves, branches
heavy with rain
i move in and out
through them
smashing my cigarette;
we've survived another
winter

now together
we bear the
burden
of
satisfying
the unfulfilled