Ross Robbins

Daytime exerts its tyranny over the moon, and all the sad-faced kids

burrow under the covers. I’m ashamed of my guilt and shame—it

turns out feeling bad is my latest addiction. Sex got boring and

disease holds sway over too many dicks. Woe is me! declares yet

another self-pity enthusiast

PRETENTIOUS GRAD STUDENT: Today has been a truly Sisyphean struggle against the existential dread of modern life! Allow me to express my despair…through interpretive dance!

He ululates in falsetto and thrashes across the room, gesticulating wildly.

My inhalation draws a swirling cloud

of glittering pollen, a garden worth

glimmering like God’s wet dream.

We are bursting, blossoming like fireworks

through this life—the sperm and egg

meet and light like bulbs: zygotic eminence.

Little curved thumb unfolds again and again

and over again into birth.

Shrieked into being and mucousy slick,

this squalling cabbage blinks 

its eyes against a light it

just cannot get.

The prerequisites have never been offered:

Inner Peace 101, Self-Acceptance Survey Course.

This fine quavering sense of who I am—

comes and goes, it comes and goes.

Karma Chameleon? More like Samsara Salamander.

hungry? let’s sliver ourselves:

into delicate stems shoots

petals

perjorate innocuous

syllables

in order that

I might break the

little literary rules

govern the placement of

poem

drag a bright red finger through the topmost crust of snow

to spell the letters of your name—

this daylong graffiti is no more brief
than our little lives to some onlooking God

delight denotes

how one lights up

when this new product

bends their tongue

into the shape

the malevolent will

of a marketing team

eye-

(light pinpricks

its way)

lid

squint : closer

closer still

close off

the you

in you

propinquity:

our hot wet places

the long and long longed-for

meeting of meatiness

yelps the phantom on the screen

channel our cumming through internet porn

Listen:

I want

what I need

and it is somewhere

to lean

some firm-bellied boy

who will breathe in my ear

sticky at nightfall

triumphant thrust

we glitter our way through this life

(blissful ephemera)

who poked holes through the birdcage slip God drapes over sky?

what deity symphonized the wash of color called sun

breathed wind into mill and milled wheat into ergot?

Listen:

I held the corners

of a canary yellow

bedsheet, leapt from

a sheer rock face

but I didn’t gently float
like some low-rent Mary
Poppins—I crashed!

I crashed! I crashed.

Wrapt in gentle tulle chiffon

silk and linen

cup my balls in lukewarm saline

puddle spit in my troughed tongue

lick my lips until they drips

rub terrycloth along my brow

dab the grease and spit

in my eye. love a good cry.

radiant amputee my heart’s become

cut green apples in cold clear water.

slotted spoons, serrated words. as in:

we need to talk. as in: the test was

Tired as a limp tortilla. Tortillas and eggshells and  orange peels and blood.

Hereby, verily, I do declare:

The least interestingest unrealnesses

of my time are as follows:

congress, AIDS, my sleeping habits and spaghetti.

Ling Ling! calls the panda handler.

Ling Ling! cries the racist telephone.

high school projector wheeled from room to room

catches pencil shavings fingers’ oils dusty hair

(oh! sprinkle these yum yums on your tongue

tongue be my little dustbin

mmm…)

The most interestingest cataclysmicness: 6th of August ‘45

when pavement sang the song of bowling balls

on tin-roofed sheds.

truncate my species

would you tsunami?

haircut clippings line

every nest. toenails

(whole ones, surgically

excised) litter beaches.

biohazard bags snagged

on razor wire.

eyeballs in ice cream

cones. Now. Tell me:

why not flood,

oh ocean? All

the multivaried viscera

of med school

dissections are flushed

down toilets, poured

in rivers. tendons

like fishwire

in water-weeds.

Was is the past tense form of

we, or the present form of war.

Warmth makes itself of the broken

bits of when, wakes in we the need

to, well, fuck.

honeyed eyes cling like peaches

drain like cans of same

Caramelized expletives gently

lick my eardrum

We’re mostly bones, I guess.

The mesh of calcium interwoven

without them just Jabba the Hutt

(in his slimmer years)

sludge my way across the floor

a slug, a snail, a semen gob

half holding fast to me like my

wise twin stuck on your palm. He sneers:

non-sequitize sense into puzzlement

as the ampersand of my breath links

moment to moment to moment to—

(and —and — and —)

Matchsticks stand, demand equal rights

or else they’ll (big surprise) self-immolate.

Too obvious! heckles the neighborhood cynic.

All the refracting views on memory, when when becomes never happened or what didn’t dent is inserted after the fact (or factually challenged) what we used to call a lie.

I didn’t say ’Simon Says!‘ shrieks the warden, but it’s too late—Ol’ Sparky has jangled the decrepit killer’s bones to dust; his pelvis wild in blue-white arcs spitting like cats.

Parse out

the hegemony

of me over

no one

Determine how blue

this skin

could be

before you’d have to

breathe.

press a palm against

mirrored marble.

there are more eloquent words than

but the meaning is the same.

Mistify (n) – to reduce to mist.

Ex.: I placed his body in an enormous atomizer

and proceeded to mistify his jelly flesh.

lenticular wisp the day

into dreamy unbeing

cumulonimba:

let us embrace

vaccinate the self

for lonely, for dying alone.

mist your way inside me. Here, allow

me to spread like I want it like

I need it like no, really like

right here and like right now.

thirsty. malignance.

see how

yummy rose

thorn swell

in belly

could be

In my aching for this beauty In my aching for this beauty oh I’m aching for this beauty.

In the dim mendicant dusk

of a hot Sunday we sweat

through the crotch of our

last clean briefs. Mash

dandelion flowers to a fine

grainy paste.

The dream is getting away from me.

Blistered by the degree

of my want

focused hard on

finding words

to complement each

other word

while still emitting

meaning,

beauty,

pomme, er,

poème— Oui!

(little apple of my mind…)

We intertwine our sticky parts,

become a fleshy tangle

woozy, perfumy with

the munificence of mums.

My vocation is loquation;

pay’s minus shit, but the intangibles

are legion. A fleshy palimpsest,

my arms bemoan a vicious

adolescence. The story of my descent
spelled out in scars across my arms.

Sweet blow of delirious language—which storm between dawn and dream could shudder the unsung soul to lather itself in this strange half-broken mystery? Or put another way: what midday turbulence would spark the self to bathe in chance?

What will it take to risk it, eh?

Conjure castanets from out the cacophony of car alarms—there! Amid the timbres of shriek and rumbled dumbness is the cunt-puntingly aggravating way I am awakened. Garbage trucks play dumpsters like drums, speak the climactic syntax of shattering glass.

Operations stem from a faulty hypothesis, cut.

Theory is less interesting than fact, look.

Geese take off like little planes, warmongers.

Rain terror on waxy leaves, shit.

Meanwhile on the alkali flats of a distant moon, hot.

As if the very word did not imply you’d freeze, dry.

Sparked to spook like a nervous fawn, trigger.

We hung around the rims of cities, homogenous.

The thickly-hookered places, cellophaned.

At the slightest hint of chase, catastrophe.

We’d set out for the next motel, slum-assed.

Another crystal dream:

my pupils wide as dollhouse plates

cataracted silvry-white

like lightninged mirrors

from which i knew

the crash’d come

the crystal’d gone

Cast out from God’s velvet ropes

when Eve presented her split

fruit. Nectar and new, this mystery.

I have longed to disconnect meaning.

How a cow femur seems 

like it could belong to anyone

This eye, pressed through a sieve

could be sour cream

And this map key doesn’t make sense!

It’s measured in increments

of an elephant’s eyelash. It’s thicker

than my pubic hair, sure,

but even Montana’s still thousands

across. (And I walked them

one by one by one by) wake, cheek pressed

sweatily into asphalt. Gritty

and hot. Cars inch by and I

did not call dad on

Father’s Day. He never earned it.

Oh, oh, oh.

The long clawing back to meaning.

Oh, oh, oh.

I am tough as leafy spurge.