Unlikely 2.0


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Two Poems by Steve Robbins

...and why not?

Popular wisdom underscores,
and with blood red crayon lines mind you,
how salubrious suspicions & blebby fears
must maintain a proud discretion.

Mingling breeds tingling, you see, and all too soon
our genteel societies must run amok.

Fortify defenses, then....
Oh Common Sense, keep us safe asleep
in cozy, kitschy bunkers.

Far too well we understand feline curiosities
like bad clichés tend to dogged, bitter ends.

(In conclusion, I sighed)
Measure our remaining days
with something borrowed, something blue
and smartly polished coffee spoons.

At this point the monkey crawled,
with slackened eyes, across my shoulder.
This clown of every-day-ity
planted a sharp fanged kiss
upon my sallow cheek. I will surely learn...
knitted hats, purled in crayon knots
were made for days like these.




Before

Accidents never define us. Not really.
Response drags the trowel.
Response textures, shadows and de-tails.

I was told this, before.
But I now know this sort of truth is not entirely true.
It ranges far too impersonal to hold human shape.
In the end it's just thinking, isn't it? Esto es humano.

We are more like cave wall glyphs
dyed in common remembrance, I think,
the pigment of mole hair and clotted blood
opalescent on the tongues of serpents.

Momentarily we are alive, human, blurbs
ballooning above the grotesque, metafiction
time erased and retraced, formed and reformed,
generations of ideas wombed in the energy of pain.

Then, in the end, our religions hustle fairy-tales.
Our medications dull the rap-tapping on the door.
Our art portrays the feigning.

We caricature en masse
the truculent accidents of living
hoping to draw a sense of all this non-sense.
We hang silly pictures on the fridge and kiss the kids
"Good Night."

Dreams do not lie. Only dreamers do.

Never provoke the undisturbed.


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Comments (closed)

omar
2011-01-24 13:01:06

nice stuff. keep dreaming. keep writing.