Rowan Ricardo Phillips - Little Song

Both guitars run trebly. One noodles
Over a groove. The other slushes chords.
Then they switch. It’s quite an earnest affair.
They close my eyes. I close their eyes. A horn
Blares its inner air to brass. A girl shakes
Her ass. Some dude does the same. The music’s
Gone moot. Who doesn’t love it when the bass
Doesn’t hide? When you can feel the trumpet peel
Old oil and spit from deep down the empty
Pit of a note or none or few? So don’t
Give up on it yet: the scenario.
You know that it’s just as tired of you
As you are of it. Still, there’s much more to it
Than that. It does not not get you quite wrong.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips - Violins

He never saw a violin.

But he saw a lifetime of violence.

This is not to presume

That if he had simply seen

A violin he would have seen

Less violence. Or that living among

Violins, as though they were

Boulangeries or toppling stacks

Of other glazed goods like young adult

Fiction, would have made the violence

Less crack and more cocaine,

Less of course and more why god oh why.

More of one thing

Doesn’t rhyme with one thing.

A swill of stars doesn’t rhyme

With star. A posse of poets doesn’t rhyme

With poet. We are all in prison.

This is the brutal lesson of the 21st century,

Swilled like a sour stone

Through the vein of the beast

Who watches you while you eat;

Our eternal host, the chummed fiddler,

The better tomorrow,

MMXVI.