Bruce Robinson


                              Comedy Hour  

                                             ( with four noncommercial interruptions)

                                                                           ocean unknowable by unknowable sand. 
                                                                                                                          —Conrad Aiken

You know that joke about the in-laws?  They’re gone,
what a relief?  Well, they’re gone, so have you,
The sound, too, except our own, the few

residual cormorants, sofy groans of whales,          
expiration of the last surviving              
embers, gruff love, warm wave, warmer sand.                     

Oh, that other joke, that line in the sand:
cargoes of iron still roiled by the sea,
nowhere to go, no here, no there. No joke:

so much sea and wind, toying with 
those few forests aflame, the earth's 
grown flatter. Where did everyone go, anyway? 

Not our question to ask,...well, sand.  The joke 
about the open-ended hourglass, badaboom:
Sand leaves no trace, the former, the latter.



Quinine
From
time
to time
one or two
would briefly, really,
not even the time of day, glare
at me, standing quite near the nonchalant armaments,
with a spark in my hand and canape in my mouth and wonder, who invited him?



                              Red Lights and Vehicles

Let's not make sense.
               Let's not have continuity.
Not even that.
               Walk biscuits back
From the supermarket
               And do not listen
To what they have to say. Pay
               For them. About silence
About wisdom. Tentacles
               From the street. They'll 
Thank you for it. Red
               Lights and vehicles.

Recent work by Bruce Robinson appears or is forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, Spoon River, Tipton Poetry Journal, Rattle, Maintenant, and Pangyrus.

 
 

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