Doren Robbins

Clay Head …the void I connect with is not a place…it’s a condition… the human eyes in the clay head. It’s a condition…it’s an attraction––don’t play games––I should’ve had that knowledge thirty years ago… thirty-one the latest…if I needed…if it could’ve made the kind of difference that would’ve mattered…if the possibility for things favorable in general…to have had the opportunity… …you think you can protest…the gall…the complete Almanac of Chutzpah…you’ll be yelling at mosquitoes––Hey you––get away from you. How do you come on with putdown crap like that? Who is Ann Sullivan…Saint Francis…Wakantonka Medicine Man John Lame Deer enough––to figure it out enough?…it was like going to sleep twice…I might’ve been a better forensic… I might’ve been less satisfied as the verifiablist I became… …with that clay head you get knocked to the floor often…or to the ground…it’s an extended period. You think you’re disinclined to danger…the reality is––there’s the thank you for your labor expression…the thank you for the entrance and the exit fees expression…then the thank you for the kiss on the cheek…now fuck-off expression…the hard core of it…there’s no stable core… …should I have paid more attention to official poverty housing crime figures?…do I have to read what’s left of 3% of council communist periodicals to get official figures on the American-Mideast Wars?…does it matter I ignore their data because what I know would be practical in terms of equity sanity reliability dependability terms of transforming the official figures won’t happen?…is it vanity or contempt to ignore the official figures?... is it vanity or contempt to put down nobility?…isn’t it vanity and contempt to establish figures and make them official?…don’t we still have nobility kicking workers’ asses…and their lackeys…their armed response …their surveillance down to the toothpick…their International Monetary Meth-Lab of Labor Nobility Consortium protecting nobility’s asses?…does vanity disrupt the prior continuity it wasn’t part of or felt as a result of…if you’re not one of nobility’s asses?…by whose definition are figures official?… isn’t it contempt for those they are certain have no educated question formulated, too worn out working under the debtor’s whip waiting in line for food stamps for Veteran’s Benefits in the nobility-tilted system to question what they’re officiating about?… do they find comfort in official figures computation?…do they find sincerity without being self-deceptive…maybe it’s an extraction where concerns about deception occur… …who am I Stendhal?…doesn’t mockery of hypocritical officials and their figures protected under the first amendment confirm pessimism as entertainment to everyone disgusted by ethical insignificance?––Ethical insignificance? Military aggression, at-will employment agreements, nationalist conviction disregard unethical outcomes… …Stendhal wrote about the Duke of Laval as a perfectly decent man…but a nobleman and a Duke…that constitutes two mental illnesses… …who is our Duke…and if there is one…our Duchess of Laval? Couldn’t we shake a Drone’s twin-boom tale configuration over a clandestine airstrip…packed with arriving and departing U.S. Dukes and Duchesses?… …I could’ve been at the door my brother kicked hard after the break in…after losing the stereo and speakers…when there still were saved-up for stereos and speakers. I bolted a grill over the repaired window, another hour installing double-deadbolts. We cleaned up debris…there were Victoria’s Secrets prison-labor made lingerie, prison-labor made brochure packets clipped in bunches under the Chinese wage-slave prison-labor made magnet …on his wage slave built in the USA-made fridge…he played a song he wanted me to hear against the First World War…saved on a portable tape recorder he took with him everywhere, “I Didn’t Raise My Son To Be A Soldier”…the buried history…a floor above The Amputee Museum…next to The Plastic Surgeons Prosthetic Advancement and Profits Portfolio Archives…the flaw for a flaw remedies…kept intact flaw…the reluctant available resistant terrified to be a Vet system conundrum…sons of a permanently disabled Vet… Bearings …followed a Torch Glow Bougainvillea overhang down a shed roof post and trellis… pulled up my sunglasses for Torch Glow… a few ragged flares…some still in red paper mâché… concern about every concern…red film…red violet white carbon paper embers…no matter what I thought you hold on to your bearings and the essential ball bearings and the never unbearable balling record… however sparse or multiplicitable the agenda and taxonomy of balling…or unfrequented balls…unless foreshortened for the non-numerical advancement of your bearings…for the extended bearable lease…for the remaining member ingenuitively stuck in place to the other structural member that rests upon the mutual bearing support… since…no matter what kind of delirium––there’s the other one…or the standing on your side upside down types… mountable enough …whether anyone alive or elsewhere can or can’t equal in delirium––one delirium eye lash––what Gypsy brass musicians do with metal and breath, the valves, the register, the passionate swaying chest arc…their shoulders’ in delirium… …their swerving…their contact—if you could brush one delirium thread of that black kid break-dancing on his neck…1999 Fox Hills Mall… making up the fix of delirium…the elevation in the descent…in the monitoring angulated cameras… in the tune-up in the back-up in the neck swing in the leap… in the face looking down his flooded veins, my flooded veins… in spite of the way things come down… in spite of the hammer I bungled on my thumb––with regularity––the frequent kind––in spite of the fact…what they used to be… whatever their party…whatever we currently call barbarians hordes warlords Blackwaterists Crusaders Conquistadores…whatever their nation…whatever the front of their occupation…the barbarian horde crusader Blackwater conquistador types have the greater phoenix––their tough luck…not likely… …the fact is…the fact cannot reassure…though the fact remains even in Upper Dementia…finished counting and recounting the nickel in his pocket…no matter what ––only gratitude to the father for coming…Carnivals Maximum to the coming father…and to the mother's uterus with its nine sails, fifteen epicenters, one drum, and the entire tulip assembly. And the continuity…the so far reliable part…you and yours…the same in the front as when you stood over a piled-up crate in the back of Jugalia’s Fruit Stand…you shook and thumped a melon… no matter what…for the ripeness you guess at…the pleasure remembered…a voice confiding it to you… …the fact is my Alzheimer’s father fogging and wiping and fogging and wiping and wiping and fogging his glasses and wiping them again saying, You can tell, look at this, you can tell, he said, my glasses must be happy they have to be happy. Why is that? What do’ya mean, what do I mean?––they’re happy, they were just blown eleven times––you think because I’m eighty-one I don’t remember how to count?…I said, In this life––you are lucky in this life––you will make love uncountable days and nights and holidays and after funerals or during funerals on kitchen tables and inside of a tent more than you ever thought…hidden from sight in hillside meadows and back seats of cars every weekend possible until you reach something like twenty when you can afford a bed or a mattress on the floor…in a room of your own even if five other people live there…even if some of them have three friends or strangers crashing there… and sick with flu, he said, you’ll stick your love…depressed out of your normal whereabouts…could be the third day into jet lag with a wart on the heel of your foot…with the whirligigs in your gizzard…with the Metatarsalgia nightmare ball on either foot––you’ll make love like a satyr, like a bride with interior wings, an old man with frensaic moves, like you descended from Venus, like a delivery boy that gets lucky, like there’re no future tubes, seven-foot doctors, I.V. ravages waiting to keep you connected to this world with your arms pinned blood sick and purple…you’re going to make love ready as anybody can be––which could be regularly in Oakland, in Portland, in The Netherlands, in the ocean at night on a rocking freighter, in swimming pools, in the musician’s dressing room, on the side of a tub roiling foaming suds…in utility rooms with one foot off the floor, with a leg over your shoulder, holding hands in the express train sleeper bursting into Florence or on the side of the road down from Redwood High Line River Trail, under the bridge on the way back up from the same trail…straddling a hidden live oak log at the back of the meadow, your back against the trunk of another diagonal log, he said because such balance is possible… 250, 000 Mites …I’ll be all right with the 250, 000 mites living in my nose…and all other noses…and dying in all noses…the dermatologist told my face scrutinizing my nose…I had no microbiological idea what he was talking about…he had no fungi diagnostic fantasy what was growing in my armpit…the armpit the reason I made the appointment…no idea why I forgot and took off with the urine sample container in my pocket…but what did urine in the first place have to do with the armpit to keep me off the job?… my cocker sheltie retriever spotted spaniel Chihuahua whatever he is will make it on his new diabetic drugs. For a year, the vet said. My cocker sheltie retriever spotted spaniel Chihuahua …humble to lick water from the street… I’m about to quit The Westwood Bar and Grill broiler man gig…I’ll go on trusting my own thirst…if I have to deliver chicken again…if I have to buy a thrift shop suit and borrow a briefcase to manage a pack of Red Bulling splifhead telephone solicitors for Korperzer’s Insurance or Fab’s Termite and Flea Exterminators again…I’ll do it… I had the laws of work need…I had it by the couch across from the window so high up the wall you see only what’s in the sky…usually what’s getting wasted in that part of the sky…if you’re inclined towards the hole in the ultraviolet radiated lid part…. I was over the screwed-over feeling, the poisons and the derangements that make up all of its weddings…most of its arousals…I was okay enough with my busted umbrella…the pawnshop double of Zen man Han Shan's umbrella…a kind of inter-tube…it could’ve been the upside-down umbrella I saw Nutty Ass the Chihuahua Clown use in a state of plain contentment …drinking from its dome with two remaining ribs… I still believe someone drowning should—if he feels he has to––reach even for the teeth of a hacksaw…the famous line of the Greek poet Archilochos––“and the heart/ is pleased by one thing after another” is propaganda to keep the pre-Socratic anarchist pests and people’s basic demands for basics discreditedly critically mute-sided…so every time––we take less…what blithe encouraging crap that segment of the Greek conquerors are famous for…suckcockering son of a bitch––you better stay at your job!…I'm saying this…someone with enough stumpy daffodils making it…in what I’m calling a strip of yard…someone without spinal herpes, oral tumors, grandma's plague…someone without split toes, fecal pins, crusted nipples…I’m saying it with enough boxed cereal, enough Greek wine, enough of her wet V, enough shoe laces in plastic, enough zip-locked soybean baco’ bit packages, enough sparse grass uplifted the pair of juncos in the front yard find something underneath to eat from… …someone between layoffs…all through the predation mechanization diet era…someone eating free pork from the barbecue where I started out four nights a week working for cash delivering then ended up cooking six months between pantry man broiler chef sauté jobs…ate some of it over-cooked, down to the cartilage, the marrow, the everything––chewed fruit down to the seeds…ate the seeds if they didn’t sting much––you lick the liquid stems at the end of wine drops––suck every last pig’s bone and gristle…entitled not to eat a meal of boring things…you’ll starve from the lack of it when you’re going to have to starve from the lack of it… …at Hellhound Barbeque they had a Robert Johnson “Hellhound On My Trail” record cover from before the middle of the last century over a punched-in hole on the wall. My cat ate the free pork when she saw fit…bones didn’t matter…gristle went first. When I was alone I’d wake up and she’d be asleep curled purring in the curve of my neck…or asleep on my chest…that squinted-eyes cat sleep. A few times she left a bird’s wing in the walkway. The first time it was a blue jay she murdered, every other time it was a blackbird…always a blackbird…gender didn’t matter. The predation mechanization you dread and live through… what’s the other relief you feel otherwise if there is?… …recorded the dream getting my callouses cured in powdered water…I was milking the fat duck––then on my back against the impending impact––my legs braced pressing my feet against something stamping around on the other side of the door… …Tuesday…repeating the mantra…arrangement of duties…the menu they gave me to memorize within a week at the Golden Bull sauté broiler man gig I covered when I still managed to have to manage to work within a sixty square feet rectangle cell… …on a bus headed for the Golden Bull…humming along in my head…I recounted…I remembered Cora…a mild private orgasm… but I thought uncomfortable…but uncontrolled…her eyes clenched …her narrow hips with powerful spring…I’m okay, she said breathing down the words, I’m not uncomfortable. What are you feeling? We kept at it. All kinds…twenty-five years after she was gone…lights watered the airplane wing…I wiped up wine drips… I wiped my face…I wiped the nose pads holding the lens frame… …most of it was allergies most of it…

Originally from Los Angeles, Doren Robbins is a poet and mixed media artist from Santa Cruz, California. After twenty-something years traveling, living in Colorado and Oregon, raising a family, and working as a cook and as a carpenter, he went back to school and then started teaching a variety of creative writing and literature courses through an extended personal and moral interpretation of Kenneth Burke’s idea of “literature as equipment for living.” His work has appeared in over one hundred publications, including The American Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, 5 AM, Hotel Amerika, The Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, Sulfur, Kayak and Nimrod. Past collections of his poetry, Driving Face Down and My Piece of the Puzzle were awarded the Blue Lynx Poetry Award 2001 and the 2008 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Poetry Award, respectively. Robbins is also the author of a collection of monologues, short fiction and prose poetry, Parking Lot Mood Swing. His recent collections are two full collections of poetry Amnesty Muse from Lost Horse Press and Twin Extra: A Poem In Three Parts from Wild Ocean Press (nominated for the Jewish National Book Council Award in Poetry). As a poet and an artist Robbins organized readings and produced posters to benefit The Romero Relief Fund and The Salvadoran Medical Relief Fund during the Salvadoran Civil War; and for poets against the war during the ongoing American-Iraq War. His writing has been awarded fellowships and grants from Oregon Literary Arts, The Loft Foundation, The Chester H. Jones Foundation, The Judah Magnes Museum, The Indiana Review, and a few other inoffensive organizations and readable periodicals. Since 2001, he has taught literature and creative writing at Foothill College.
 
 
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