Nine
Poems by Anthony Robinson Author's Links |
Double
Sonnet in the Style of Jimmy Ray
Your mammy's? Works girlfriends/I like gulf war nerve gas which is what the grackles say if you listen real hard with your ears to the glass. And again: I named my cat Objective Correlative, and I no longer get sad or cry but I get in fights all the time now, and my ears itch. We fly. We are a family of swans we are a nifty package my girlfriend's lips are soft her legs are veined-- Her nerves are shot. The gas works very slowly. Her skin is hot to touch and much whiter than mine. Objective Correlative scratched her on the wrist. The blood was brownish. Utilize techniques one might find a special case a pool cue. Mind your peas. The flash lasted precisely 14 seconds. Each second was better than the first and each second was a line. This is a pledge: i.e. undying love, plaster, fuck, a soft blue blanket. Incipient Beginnings become obsessions, and then abeyances, a bee in your bonnet, crucial stones in the path: we have commenced movement, lumbering forth as sleep -sated bears de-hibernate-April's green and all that. Maybe endurance, suppleness of vision, translation: carry over the innerthing from here to there, make the dead bones more than merely important: lives of the saints and such. Performance might see us through rough times, you might sing an edgy shanty, pull apart your blouse, give another dollar to the ferryman. Oh, how can I begin, oh how, with you just standing there? Last Minute Instructions If you go after, also come underneath. Two are better than three but not as good as five. If you pick teams, watch the thread as it follows--watch the eye. What comes back also casts off: skin, light. At the moment of climax, the sword falls off the wall. The bridge was suitable for runaways and billygoats. My mother does not resemble your mother. I'd like to begin with an apology--crème fraiche comes later. She had never been to a hip-hop concert before. Certain fountains come pre-packaged with pennies. Don't let the toad get wet--the cleaning bills are outrageous. Poem for Janice Pang and Michael Palmer She meant to say "inscrutable," but what came out was "endeavoring," partly perhaps she lived in a city where nothing was a job description and nothing was what one saw out the back of the shambling truck. This is why she was quiet. Her handwriting was clear, not at all indistinguishable from the scribble, the scrabble, the rubble. The rapport she shared with the tiny gnomes of West Garden was a substitute for the gulf between the mouth of the Lop Chang and the Mexican Wilderness. There were spots there, the sky filled in slowly with dots, black dots, flies and bees and rubberbands. We bounce back. We bounce. It's fun. Substitute because for perhaps in the second millennium, line 'em up, and BOINGGG. Back to the bay area. Back to back matches. Sulfur doesn't always accompany the devil. Sometimes it's sugarcane or coconuts or a retinue of hula dancers swishing their leis in Morse Code. She told me she was writing ode to those less fortunate. The names on the mountains were visible from the city. The mole (poking out from the seedpile) said: but it's automatic writing, right? It's French, it's dirty. I don't think I like it. I like it. She's covered with blue fur and she's nailing shut the pages of this golden book. The sun is having a hell of a time, the mussel shells are broken open. Look at the thin hollow column. Look at the light. Poetry Answers It flounders on the front lawn. Its eyes are on the same side of its head, where news is stamped alongside salmagundi. The titters it hears from the balcony come from the already written. They're reading salami, they've discarded their yardsticks, they listen and laugh from the edge of dead hoaxer's skull. The impertinence is infectious. Their names ain't legion, nor plunging swine. They misuse irony. They walk in single file. They put emery boards in orifices. The Princeton like the Hustler is a reference for the rest of us. It pays to protrude, like a book from the uniberry. If you scribble on the margin, you'll live in a big house and fart on birds if you please. Banality, is of course your reward. A Japanese-American marginalized poet told me I was daft. I thought he said deft. The death of the referent has left me bereft. May I have a sip of your chai? Take a letter and leave a penny--pen your thought on versing burglars. Smile but don't guffaw. Sit up straight. And where are you going? I'm leaving and I'm taking the poems. Where are you going? Somewhere between the literal and the littoral. Precipitate Thought the cold might offer up a reason, that maybe a dry, inhospitable season as this winter is could do the faculties some good: leafpile slush hasn't gathered yet-- nearly ten months since the last shoe-sludge flood, no freeform rainwater ponds, no mud gathering in the yard, spilling out over the curb, no youthful need to seek heat with another body; no not yet-- one's left wanting it wet, skies unopened portend empty spring whose respite's joy plays keen against the unburdened before; frost collected on the ground only kindles desire for what, like most appreciated things usually arrives unwanted. Revolve It Wonderfully, You Rhetorician-- He's tired, our man, of blowing up bridges, tired of reticence--avoid crossing, look the other way-- "Socrates stopped himself..."you can only take so much. Teaching, that is. "...with you," that is. Think about an idea that already concerns you-- borrow an old one. How's this? An essay: her reasons (parenthetic) for leaving were obsucured by crescent slivers and halves of zeros. Half of what? (The basic problem with fallacy is...) Take the slope--it's greasy. If X then Y then the line is too damn clever. But is it enough, ever? If it works, apply the wrench, and pull away a face: imperfect, broken body, little one: the self becomes the reader...he switches on the kitchen light, he switches on the bathroom light, he splays himself across the porch, the voices dwindle-- hair, thick, black, eyes, green, this accursed circumstance-- "Please don't be personal in a way that detracts from substance..." Romantic Meditation for a Steadily Shifting Landscape It's starting to rain and I think the coffee is cold. This sudden wish for transformation has come undone under the tree-cover one can only imagine through this fog. If you understand the pattern of the leaves, yellow and light grey against the stinking sidewalk, you'll understand the strange papers left on the doorstep, the men who swarm when the bumble bee zooms past, and you'll end the senseless grieving occasioned by the fall. May your step be never sullied by the unclean places behind you, the giant gulf between good intention and rotten berries. May the day unfold like a dirty napkin, full of itself and of food and a good word and bring news of the not-as-bereft as you. Once you girlfriend said you were too fat--she's seen the thin photographs and is not impressed. May it all be over by January 10th. The presidency will be canceled and the fruits will leap from the trees into lead-seamed tin cans with paintings of peaches. The young girls from across the sea of bright building murals wear scarves knotted into their hair. You've seen them skipping, you've devoured the last of the lamb and the baked beans. Settling in seems like the price one pays for unmitigated affection. The stars will never go out as long as you carry a monkey wrench in your side pocket. One can always hope that things really do get better: social security, pretty silver hair, teeth you can take out, place on the stand near the window out which several fleas are leaping, fleeing the quixotic cat you named for your seven biggest fears, but later shortened to Midget. And I'm hoping soon for a refill, a warm up, a bright waitress to come, sweep the crumbs from my table, for the fog to clear. Signage "This bathroom is being clean by a lady janitor" What this mean (s) anyone's guess conjecture often leads to fresh perception, but it may not always be useful the horse/water tale could apply my guess that she's pristine, like porcelain and your problem is the pronoun- which makes you tense. In the primordial heat and mess of last week-language was grunts, gestures used to convey desire: hunger, lust, extreme unction / and we continue to dwell in inhospitable zones / so very hot in here, the lady janitor wears a glass slipper and confounds even the most princely of expectations you want a last page, a period / the wind is your nemesis |
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