Doren Robbins 


Late Love with Photomontage

	1.

The main thing is you pay if you go or don’t get to go. 
You work some dull job using your body eight-ten 
hours a day five-six days a week at some building, 
some part of the 
technical language small talk donkey physical reserve 
awe and sweat of constructing. 
The sweat sanity draining out of you part of what carries you,
part of the fascination sanity. 
If you outlive it there’s no reconciliation. 
Perfututum. Totally screwed. 

“Crossing the boundary” detail #1.

The main thing is the erotic feeling
the grinding praises
especially the wringing spent ones in addition 
to the regular wringing spent ones
and the drainers (so far)
especially the wringing spent ones in addition 
to the drainers 
and the mutual ones
or the muted types
that quaking
the ones that don’t have the tone

“Crossing the boundary” detail #2.

of a worked-out struggle
the opposite of an epic 
a collapsed throat 
a wringing spent collapse
not the opposite of a siren
it wouldn’t be worth it, a struggle without mesmerism 
up to the continuous brushing together ongoing 
exhilaration stamina position 
(not confined to a mattress)
but who can remain in the vertical cloud past 
three AM in the seventh stage of man? 
And when that ends, then what?

The main thing 
it’s impossible to be rational 
about sustained attraction. 
You’re on a ship the size of a hill. 
The exact fit 
(and the other ones) 
all the fits required
the fantasized fits
the unexpected
magnetized angles.  
You grow old melody 
coming out of the drizzle 
coming out of the leaves 
coming out of her
coming out of the bath.



	2.

All the times you’d think he was in over his head 
you’d be right. 
It was like watching someone experience 
the molecular structure and ingredients of his flaws. 
Then the trivial hassles came on like the worst ones. 
No annexation from the mood
came in first. 
Depression, the sawed-off mountain inside a molehill
came in first. 
Depression the calculator digs your grave 
with a moustache comb
it leaves you under lake water teenagers on waterskies 
pee into the water above you. 
They’re not sirens 
no reassurance
you’re under their faces
their faces are plaster and leaves. 
Sheep counting giants in the cloud of the beanstalk came in first. 
The fact such attachments outlast you.
They will complete you,
citizen of a wrong decision-making species. 
I almost popped my cherry. 
We suddenly made love less. 
We were down to one position when we weren’t in pain. 

What’re you saying to me, he couldn’t step out of the way of a 
charging police mob? He said he remembered her fondly without 
being glad? He thinks like that? Bum Darling was there? 
He takes care of him still? Bum Darling. Always has been. 
Why, why couldn’t he seat himself in front of the plate. Where 
was he? He still goes to Arousal Therapeutics? Someone beat 
him? Why is she humping him? 

Are you listening to yourself? 
Who is exempt? 
Citizen of a ready to jack or mass jack you up species. 
So far. A species that invented autopsies.
I became precise when there was a rhythm. 
It was physical. 
It was oral. 
The random habit. 
I wasn’t always under attack. 
There’s an infusion. 
My studies suffered. 
I thought in spoken phrases. 
There was a children's program announcer's voice 
from the upper apartment, it came in and out of my 
mind, who knows the spawning effect? 
What is it you learn about what you’re hanging from 
in your mind anyway? 
Unresolved. 
You’ll be contradicted. 
You become resolute
because if you don’t: then what? 
I remember the decision-making process. 
There were fragments. 
Conditional ineptitude. 
Not a memorable effort. 
He would have made an agile assassin.
There's an aesthetics to his rage 
justice and panic Jew massacre descendant.
He had a faculty for diagnosis.
What's the use? 
I come from a people.
Intensity came exclusively to disorient.
You oscillate, 
not the petrified oscillation.
A man reverted to anxiety.
A faculty for excess did him in
accelerated tenacity did it 
the exuberance behind the enigma originating exuberance.
Who is ever convulsionary enough? 
He reverted to mind-organizing plants and herbs.
He's a White Clown to himself
a winded man
a white reject
a helluva sportsman.

Tentative Ear.


	3.

If I knew you would read this far 
I would’ve dried a gourd
I would’ve built up the water 
I would have done more to decrease the magnitude 
of dreaming against yourself. 
Whatever the dream in question. 
For me it was the two pair of lungs going 
against me in the dream. 
What I was going through. 
Consider the plums she found 
the colored rims
the skins curled down.
They went passed an unstable shadow
plums on twigs hung to break.
Inside the unstrung tie of her dress 
he held two shores.
So did she.
They were next to the barber shop pole
four o’clock in the morning Second Street
then in the orchard.
He held the face she kept to herself.
One shore pounding. One shore washed over.
He caught her hair in his palm. 
Alert smelling night air, horses, and deer. 
How does the dream diagnose what to dream?



	4.

I was in Subscriptions. 
Disturbing sounds. 
All hours. 
They never add up. 
This isn’t a fantasy without captions. 
How did he end up complicit with negative fate? 
The denier is worse off. 
What the hell is worse than negative fate? 
What’s the obsession with negative fate? 
You sleep under a fluoroscope lens. 
At this hour, in this angle, who doesn’t? 
I was on foot. 
I came here following parking lots 
then meadows of private property. 
The phone screen is too small 
words were never meant to be assigned to it. 
There’s an encyclopedia entry 
The Emotional Frontier Gauge
it looks like toy armor
it has a Neolithic-dated carbon cell structure. 
Anybody can see that. 
I thought it said Subconscious, it said Subscriptions. 

Even though he expressly made his insight 
for an Imperialist Queen’s favor
I agree with Pedro Calderon De La Barca 
“Life’s a Dream” 
though in the final third of "life’s a dream" 
the dreams become more factual. 
But I have never had to say about them
"Sometimes a stone of wine and a mud horse meant 
something treacherous could happen." 
I’m the wrong person to ask about them. 
I don’t know enough about these parts 
or come from these parts enough. 
I intended to speak only of what I know about 
the honeycomb on its mental island
if that’s what it is
descending from a starling’s egg 
if that’s what it’s doing there. 

Night on Gratitude’s Whale.

After the last procedure the best I could do was carry 
out the garbage without falling. 
The best I could do was sweep the deck 
after careful instruction in advance
with a stone of wine and a mud horse moving 
just ahead of me
before the water covered them with apple skins. 
I’m not dependable I'm not the one to consult 
whether the pattern 
of their habits is accurately calculated for maximum 
benefit. Even if they are
even when we emigrated 
on the merchant ship Gratitude’s Whale 
I never meant to say a thing about gratitude. 
Peace is too irregular for that quality
and desire should end after death not before it. 

Doren Robbins is a poet, mixed media artist, and literary critic.

Three new books, (1) Apocalypse Contemporary, on Sharon Doubiago’s book Naked to the Earth.
Can be ordered from the author or from the publisher.

(2) Not Fade Away: Poetic Prose Monologues, Three Sequences, which can be ordered from the publisher and also through the author at the email address above.

and (3) Sympathetic Manifesto, Selected Poems 1975-2015.
Order from the publisher: https://www.spuytenduyvil.net/sympathetic-manifesto.html

 
 

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