DOREN ROBBINS

Doren Robbins' poetry and prose poetry has appeared in over seventy literary journals, including The American Poetry Review, Cedar Hill, North Dakota Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Indiana Review, Poetry International, Hawaii Review, Kayak, Paterson Literary Review, Pemmican, Sulfur, New Letters, 5 AM, Exquisite Corpse, Willow Springs, Bombay Gin and Hayden's Ferry Review.

He has published critical essays and articles on Thomas McGrath, Kenneth Rexroth, Philip Levine, Deborah Eisenberg, Charles Bukowski, Larry Levis, Carol Tinker, Katerina Gogou, and Kazuko Shiraishi among others.

Co-founder of the Los Angeles-based journal Third Rail, from 1975-82 he served as co-editor. In 1994 he served as a contributing editor to the Japanese-based literary journal Electric Rexroth.

Robbins has received a state fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts, as well as prizes, grants, and awards from The Indiana Review, River Styx, Literal Latte, Passaic Poetry Center, the Loft Foundation, The Centrum Residency Program, The Judah Magnes Museum (first prize in the Anna Davidson Rosenberg competition for Jewish-American poetry), The Chester H. Jones Foundation (commendation prizes in '93, '96 and '97), The Lane Literary Guild (first prize), The Seattle Arts Commission and, as an editor, from the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines and The California Arts Council. He has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize.

His four previous collections are Driving Face Down, winner of The Blue Lynx Prize, Lynx House Press, Eastern Washington University, 2001; The Donkey's Tale (Red Wind Press, 1998); Sympathetic Manifesto (Perivale Press, 1987); and The Roots and the Towers (Third Rail Press, 1980). His chapbooks include Dignity in Naples and North Hollywood, introduction by Philip Levine (Pennywhistle Press, 1996), Under the Black Moth's Wings (Ameroot, 1987); Seduction of the Groom (Loom press, 1982).

A teacher of creative writing and English since 1991, he has taught at The University of Iowa, University of California at Los Angeles, Linfield College, CSU Dominguez Hills, Santa Monica College, and East Los Angeles College. Currently, he is Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Foothill College, where he is coordinator for The Foothill Writers' Conference.

Education: Union Institute, BA, 1990. The University of Iowa, MFA, 1993. Two years post-graduate studies in literature and criticism at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 1994-96.

AWARDS/ PRIZES

Indiana Review Poetry Award, Honorable Mention for "Gulls." Judge: Mark
Doty. 2002.
Allen Ginsberg Award (Paterson Lit Review): Honorable Mention Prize
For the poem "Four Family." 2002. Judge: Maria Mazziotti Gillan.
Pushcart Prize nomination by Dorianne Laux and Christopher Howell (2002 for 2001).
Pushcart Prize nomination by Sharon Dubiago (in 2001 for 2000).
Blue Lynx Award for Driving Face Down. Judge: Dorianne Laux, 2001.
River Styx, International Poetry Contest. Honorable Mention, 1998. Judge: Molly Peacock.
Literal Latte, Poetry Awards, New York. Third Prize, Fall, 1998. Judge: Carol Muske Dukes.
National Poetry Series Finalist. Book of poems: Cloth of Cilantro, 1997.
Kathryn M. Morton Poetry Prize Finalist. Book of Poems: Cloth of Cilantro, 1998.
Centrum Residency Program, Washington. Full Fellowship, Writing Residency, 1997.
The Chester H. Jones Foundation, Ohio. Commendation Prize, 1997. Judges: Diane
Wakoski and David Bottoms.
Pushcart Prize nomination. Poem: "Beneath the Jewish Music," nominated by Hayden's Ferry
Review, 1996.
Oregon Literary Arts, Oregon. Fellowship in Poetry, 1996.
Judah Magnes Museum, California. Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award, First Prize, 1996.
The Chester H. Jones Foundation, Ohio. Commendation Prize, 1996. Judge: Wakoski.
Bumbershoot, Washington. Reader at the Seattle Arts Festival, Summer, 1996.
Lane Literary Guild, Oregon. First Prize and Publication, Summer, 1996.
The Chester H. Jones Foundation, Ohio. Commendation Prize, 1993. Judge: Wakoski.
The Loft Foundation, Minnesota. Full Fellowship. Reader in a festschrift for poet Thomas McGrath on the occasion of his 70th birthday, Fall, 1985.

COMMENTS ON DOREN ROBBINS' POETRY

What of the tired, the lost, the cast aside? We behold them all, revealed in their human complexity with tenderness, wit and rage in Driving Face Down, a book that's been a long time coming. Robbins' vision is necessary and vital, from his Chagallesque portraits of characters like Mrs. Penser of 5th Street Market with her deformed "death camp fingers," Abrams, the immigrant-tile-setter-turned-deli-man-in-America, the eighty-four year old Anna with her "kelp beds of fake jewelry," to his vast, unflinching vision of L.A. in "My Pico Boulevard." I admire the gritty, original, uncompromising voice that drives these rich, furious poems.

Dorianne Laux, final judge for Driving Face Down, winner of The Blue Lynx Prize, 2000
( Eastern Washington UP, 2001).

Doren Robbins combines politics and ecstasy, mourning and dancing. He is a superb poet, centered, strong, gentle, musical. He puts the drivellers to shame. He is a truth-teller.

Gerald Stern commenting on Driving Face Down.

These are remarkable poems. It is a poetry that is needed, and it is a poetry that is rare in this place and time.
Adrienne Rich, on Driving Face Down.

"...Robbins loves the people and places the world has allowed to drop out of history or, for that matter, never let in. He's taken the chore of a new Adam and set about the naming of all the earlier one never got around to, for the earlier one never got as far as North Hollywood or Pico Boulevard. Naming the unnamed is Robbins' first priority, noting the unnoted, filling in all the details of those lives that have waited for ages, perhaps since Villon, at the frontiers of poetry for an invitation to come in...Robbins' work sounds very little like most of what is being published in America by poets his age and for the simple reason that he's consumed by what has driven him to fury. I would guess that he's read Wallace Stevens and Marrianne Moore, but he doesn't seem to have the least interest in replicating either or in creating a surface so ornate and seductive that the reader doesn't bother to ask what, if anything, is beneath it. He comes out of another tradition, one we forget in these indifferent times at our own peril, the tradition of the aforementioned Villon, of Corbiere, Celine, Henry Miller, Tom McGrath, and most recently Gerald Stern, the great outsiders who bless our daily lives with their boundless love and rage."

Philip Levine. From his introduction to Doren Robbins' Dignity in Naples and North
Hollywood. (Pennywhistle Press, 1996).

Sympathetic Manifesto is a strong and far ranging book. A politically committed poet, Doren Robbins responds with anger and tragic empathy to the struggles in Central America and elsewhere. The book also includes examples of remarkable love poetry and evocative elegies, in fact, anger and love unify his work as expressed in his poems for Marilyn Monroe, Soutine, Pavese, and others.

Thomas McGrath (on Sympathetic Manifesto, Perivale Press, 1987)

This is a poetry of passionate commitment to people, social issues, love. Whether he is being fierce or tender, a person with a definite presence who speaks his own truths and is sure of those truths, emerges from the poems. It's great to read such work after seeing so many puny-voiced poems in our contemporary world.

Holly Prado, on Sympathetic Manifesto.

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BEATING THE 1968 DRAFT

1968 I told the army psychiatrist that's right I believe in polygamy I believe in polyandry I believe in polysaturation, I constantly unwillfully and calculatingly wet the bed, I am flatfooted in either foot, I was a temporary bigamist, I believe in the rights of hermaphrodites as I much as I like, I once had a nipple under my left arm myself, only time I leave the apartment is when my brother takes me to see animation and there is not so much animation left, ya know? I've eaten marinated bugs, listen up: my balls are different colors, how can you not understand that I want to oil paint when I defecate, when I look in telescopes I see myself as I once was, I believe in the arithmatic of demons, I believe I am sitting in the column of one of their calculations right now, and that white jacket over your uniform can't be real, it just can't be—I'm telling you I reversed my balding through yoga, I've had cholera, a little typhoid, syphilis fantasies, nose herpies, impeded nail growth, The Embryonic Flu, mucous maximus, erectilous continuous, Apollo's dysentery, imaginary mumps, imaginary moir, premature self-hate, overgrown pubic hair, multimononucliosis, portable circumcision, nocturnal levitations, dingleberry cropshares (not to be confused with swindleberry  recession)...

I was nineteen, it was my shittiest year, I was trapped in there, the trap before the next trap, still I was becoming a clam licking king and an unacknowledged young master of petite muerte (whenever I got the chance), (not usually)—I was nineteen, I was a mutistic harp, I was a disalienating bookwarm, I was an unconscious spontaneous, I boiled my eggs in ale, hashish, distilled water and Excedrin, I see it: my inheritance will be an un-slotted screw, I used Meth/Meth used me, I cured Bo Diddly of iamics he cured me of enunciatory anemia, John Hammond and Little Willie Kirkland cured me of Perplexis Monotonus, I will never shave: it's entirely a coordination problem, I believe there is protein in Romalar cough syrup, dear old Romalar cough syrup I think it had codeine in it, truly I was glad to finally find a doctor, I couldn't afford one any other way, I was feeling the need for watermelon! Karpuzi! Make some room!  

There I was with in post-psychiatric depression ultimus standing naked in a naked line with someone asking me to cough. I was not startled to look down and see someone with my balls in his hands. And shall you not follow orders when some stranger's got all two of your balls in his cold palm? After that— enough was enough. Another doctor, two sergeants, a corporal, and a man who looked like he was eager to fillet anything from a field mouse to a mastodon stepped forward—and they got me to bend over. Four of them on my back bending me over while a fifth looked up my lower rear keyhole.  But it wouldn't've mattered in the long run to them if I did bend or I didn't. It was a nationalist lynch mob of a draft board. It didn't matter if they didn't know how the corporations or the stock market or Oscar Meyer Wieners were involved or if they were just hanging themselves. They had plenty to replace themselves and my selves. They had plenty of rope. It wasn't a drizzle of sweat off their asses, even their dead asses—not when it came down to following orders. They had plenty to waste.

I was talking to a Nazi with a Redondo Beach accent, who directed me to the yellow line, which I had already followed halfway through up to the stainless steel counter where I spilled my urine sample on the Lab Tech's hand handing it to him somewhere on the way out, somewhere on the way to getting deferred—I already lost three brothers before they were 19—I wasn't going to Vietnam, and I wasn't going to boast about not going. It was less cursed here than it was there. That's all.

That was the year I delivered food for Mr. James Barbeque. I lasted five months and twenty minutes at Mr. James. That was the year I lasted up to the first lunch break at Grandmother's Spark Plugs, and two-days/one hour at Crazy Joe's Indian Vacuum and Sewing Machines. I was 19. I didn't have much. I had 2/3 of a girlfriend who knew just how to get her makeup so she looked old enough to buy stout malt liquor at Duddle's Canyon Liquor Store. I had an old red and black push‑button automatic Dodge Dart convertible that burned up more of the Shah's oil than most—a pliers turned on the heater and radio; no door on the glove compartment, no back seat cover, no payment. And I needed a head‑light, I needed a tail‑light, I come from Yiddsville, this is the way one of them talks.

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CHAUCER'S QUILL, SAPPHO'S LIBIDO, FREIDA KAHLO'S EYE BROWS

And I still think as if I think there's time–a safety-catch–I still fantasize about never returning from Crete, an alternate life–I'm talking about isolation and fertility. I thought I found it in Oregon, which is the opposite of Crete, which is the opposite of sterility, and that's what held me in its spell, because everything flowered out of that watery landscape that was comprised of really nothing more than pure fungus, sponge, fir needles, fir mold, 2.3 million deer, and one mystic who lived in a sand dune, one of the seven that are left.

When I was eighteen I thought it would be Spain, but in Spain in 1967, I was nothing. Franco was everything. To prove this point his National Guardsmen walked up and down the aisles of the train, especially third class where we sat with the field hands and the chickens and the grandmothers wrapped in their worn black shawls, while they stared down fingering their rosaries. National Guardsmen in weird three-corneded hats swaggered through with submachine guns turning over baskets of grapes, threatening anyone who was asleep, grabbing girls by the hair, whirling chickens over their heads. On either side of the train machine guns were set-up and ready, Franco was still everything in 1967, I was nothing, I was 18, half the time I didn't even know how to get laid when I could get laid. Still, I thought it would be Spain, especially after Franco's heart and two-thirds of a testicle finally dried up, but it was Oregon, Oregon and Crete―

I'm talking about how to live without apathy, that's what Crete taught me. Every couple of years I eat from the figs I brought back from Crete. If I didn't   abduct myself before crapping away another three weeks or ten years of my life figuring out the best way I could "securely" remove myself–to live somewhere else–I would have no one and nothing to thank for my mother load of red figs; and I wouldn't have found the Cedar Wax Wing on the roof-deck. Even though it took me long enough, I saw all the way into the roots of the tail and the gray sexual ridges that slipped over the eyes. That was Oregon: gifts I never thought of reaching me, a place I never thought of getting them from. We buried the Cedar Wax Wing wrapped in an Arizona-brand handkerchief produced by slaves in Indonesia, I placed the Wax Wing next to the juniper wet with berries, mashed a few juniper skins and laid them on the cloth for fragrance. It was really the opposite of a burial.

I also owe something to somebody in the Willamette Valley for the allergy medicine: it had speed or something in it. I hoped it would. I take what I can get. But between Crete and Portland, between the Caves of Ida and Klamath Falls I never found anything like Georgia O'Keefe's larkspur-or-brown-leaves mysticism–I found other solutions up there; that is, I know Cedar Wax Wings and deer in any form are mystical, but so are doves–those flying deer from San Juan Capistrano. Are there ever enough thanks for deer? That's what Oregon gave me, it was always the raw attention of dreaming about what I was going through in the dream while I was dreaming–or was it the reverse of dreaming, the momentary complete actualized opposite of dreaming, whenever I saw deer on my walks at night, or on a remote path in the daylight, or when they would wander into the yard to eat our Japanese persimmon blossoms and Mountain Ash berries? They're the most sacred animals in the world to the Huichol Indians who don't believe in hell or eternal punishment, though they believe your soul will be trampled by a corral of mules if you ever fucked one of your children (or a Spaniard).

Never saw again that kind of electric yellow skirt rinsed over the outside tail feathers, never saw again the kind of sure rowing that flexed in the haunches of the doe that lived with her buck and two fawns for a month in our yard. The only thing that comes close—is the erratic peace of all surf I feel when I take L. from behind.

Then Oregon stopped working. Oregon not for Doregon. That's when you have to enter the subject of "stop" in "stopped working." Everyone fills in their own specific details—everyone who's forced to look–those who don't want to look: screw them and good health to all to all. Not look? Not look? The subject of "not looking"?—that's a real marathon in which every marathon is a variation on apathy, or is it idiocy, which is itself the precision of imprecise self-loathing.

*

Then, then, I thought Dr. Martin Heidegger told me truth—and he partly did— without a fish scale of emotion, though the fish bones in the goatee kinds of truth don't necessarily correct Heidegger's inadequacies…

And I accepted it, after 43 there was no fooling around: I would never write like the writers who don't even have chance to be censored. I just kept pissing along while the language-detergent-celebration-sanitation-and-solution poets were getting their acceptance. And why complain? Better them, than the Libertarians. So I never had a piece of the language-camouflage-solution help me through my first or my 443rd abyss. The people in the language mastectomy business are busy collating and editing Nixon's or Mao's or Eliot's or Heidegger's or Ezra Pound's letters. I too love Hedigger's idea about "the path of the unapparent," but Heidegger's Final Solution allegiance—solved my allegiance. Therefore, the American Gestapo enthusiast Henry Ford's only excuse must be that he wasn't a philosopher, a poet, or a statesman. Unselective compassion is not mandatory—I take a quick dogsquirt on all of their masterpieces, including the speeded-up assembly line for the Model-T Ford, and Pound's famous long poem including history (not including more than one worker), (some kind of masterpiece of a way to see History), (it seems).

And the language clitorectimists excuse the Heideggers, the Maos, the Pounds and Pounds and Pounds of Henry Fords―that's what they're jizzed over when they celebrate Heidegger, like Pound, one of the major anti-emotion Kings. Anti-emotion must be the dominant emotion. Everybody knows what the anti-emotionalists already rule or are about to rule, plan on ruling, frustrated there isn't enough or more to rule, haven't ruled long enough, always publicly apologizing for not ruling more and making the world safe for more ruling. Their thinking is not mad, they don't even believe in the wrong truth, but an alternate truth: so watch it: nothing's over. Public Service they call some of it. Doesn't anyone know who it is figuratively if not literally slitting other peoples' throats in their names? Not really. Therefore, we are ruled by a species of head and neck surgeons and the language bulimics who serve them their strained little works of monographic caca–Sweet'n'low at best–there's just too much empty prescription language. I'm really not supposed to know what to do about it. Maybe dear silly Alex Pope once knew, or hard-up Eliot, or now: Duchess Vendler or Chancellor Palmer. So much anxiousness to speed down to a well that'll never renew itself. Not the right kind of abyss for my genitalia, not to mention for my mouth and voice, which are dear to me as my genitalia. Almost, almost.

Where I'm at is in the room that doesn't fit right–the usual studio apartment, yet: a banquet hall. I live anonymously enough for someone crazed about winning awards and money and being buried next to Chaucer's quill, or Sappho's libido, or at least one of Freida Kahlo's eye brows. The advantage of the smaller room is: there's less space for the grasping of clarity to recede. I smell the steaks two blocks away—what isn't near is also fragrant, therefore palpable—that is, there's enough wine in everything. I think there's enough. Don't think I don't know how hard it is to be the Dionysus of Oregon, or the Muddy Waters of Kabul, or the Dylan of Mountain View, not to mention Picasso from Limbo. When I lose the wild spunk they represent, and I meagerly represent, on Wednesday in my worst month: February (or one of the other ten) in the middle of the year 2058, I'll have to close up shop, I know I will, I know my self, not much will have changed. As for the history of that organic depletion—I lost a little of my private Muddy Waters, and about a pint of my wine, in one of those step-family group-therapy bonanzas—I lost another couple of syringefuls in one of those hotel kitchens where you have to work flip-flop shifts: close at one in the morning, open at eight. One of the last metric tons of my Mountain Dew was lost in the enigmatic fertility dream where I splashed out a pond full of silver dollars and spermatozoa but ended up with a fake nose…I couldn't help that or some of the other violent times with myself. I couldn't help it so well and with such regularity you would think I wouldn't ever run out of the skin to absorb it. That's how it was living in one tight room after the other with my dog and his two-thirds of an eye outliving most of the people who lived with us. I used to think: "Everyone who writes about love tells the truth in their poems and stories, then they lie to themselves and stand by the lie." Now I think the opposite might contain more of the truth.  "There's a little wine in everything," I answered in my mind, alone a few years, a few hours, later, looking for a metal clip in the drawer.

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MY DYLAN THOMAS

What a moribund romantic oratory cornball-plaid-on-plaid delight husky dressed-up and disheveled man, distracted by the end of himself at either end, without a chance of a reasonable chance, flying drunk drowned in a shot glass lew into me. When I delivered in West Hollywood for Mr. James "you-need-no-teeth-to-eat-my-beef" Bar BQ—when I was the tip slave smiling 18 year-old at the door with my aluminum covered chicken, brisket of beef, hot links, cornbread, ribs and sauce—and I tried to write poems like his, the food beside me, between deliveries, pulled over, hunched in my car, in my head, rush of my consonants, my vowels, my slanted moods.

 His little round boy drunkard's face was right on the cover of the old Oscar Williams' paperback anthology of poems I took with me everywhere, ignoring the forty-one other non-faces on the same cover because he was the one, he had it, way down he had it inside the rootlet swinging nerve ends, everything else read like pallor, those other poets didn't get it, I owned his poems by the voice, by the neck, by the larynx folded mega vowel tide lyric feeding the human throat, his throat, anyway. Man, I was 18, the once of an excruciating once. I'll take it. I threw it back quick enough. Too quick. As quick as it takes. His language exotic half comprehensible floating boy only once tragedy talk ecstatic or not so ecstatic in the whiskey gauze boredom living sound that he sang, that swung that way, that mostly mournful sand hill mine shaft caving in of sound and mood swing, that death in the middle of life closer to the beginning of the middle, in the middle of Jameson whiskey, in the middle of his first son's birth, in the middle of his daughter wetting the bed, in the middle of a sand crab cracking heron, in the middle of the struck shell salt blood mess, in the middle of his wife's soaking braid behind her wet neck switching, in the middle of "Auld Lang Syne," in the middle of a commercial, in the middle of the Welsh woods, in the middle of relocation -concentration-reservation camps, in the middle of raw eggs and stout. 

Amazing to be spelled by those few poems in the anthology. That language of a legend.  Who can sing like the canary of Rhiannon? I could pass now for the coo-coo of Cardiff Avenue, or the music box of a crab shell shut down on the hollow sand; oil dead, detergent dead, sand, some of it. I have my black birds, my bushtits, my sparrows, but I'm more of a potato than a bird because I'm more of the ground than anything else. Except for the mockingbirds—I'm trapped with mockingbirds, as far as the birds go they don't look like they're supposed to stir up anything: so drab, so way beyond plain, those mockers—in singing they are second only to the cardinal, and I've heard them when they make cardinals sound dull—in singing, thinking of him, the cardinal is alone in that language, languet of his throatful erections—she hears him, I hear him, the leaves open their skins to him, just about everything opens to him, I did.  I still have the old Dylan Thomas cardinal legend scratched voice roiling waters vinyl pub shore roaring voice tide receding sound in the middle of the mourning vowels in the consonantal stream in his mouth, in the middle of the wave's folded surging and dropping, in the middle of the day, in his throat still in my head, in my heels, in the middle of the Ocean Park tram ride, in the June light that started up my eyes on the topping waves, in that voice of his singing over the undertow in my head. Still there. Still, still.

I was 18 at the beginning of the night before I took my ribs, my chicken, my sauce, when I was offered acid or grass instead of money for tips in the Hollywood Hills and Laurel Canyon, when I walked into the synagogue cantoral leaking blood clot singing whiskey mouth language pollen wail, reading him until the big order came out and I loaded up at the beginning of the night, mournful syllable sweating dressed to die as he said he always was, wing made of his tongue, height flown down from, leading me somewhere.

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I ENDURED THE LECTURE "ON DUCKS, BUTTONS, AND GENDER IN CHAUCER"

Doctor said to take the heat out of my hot piss—I better to stay off coffee, but now I am Mr. Coffee.  Right now coffee is the only medicine for this headache, backache, ballache, sinusblisters, jointaches below the right ear, hairstiffness in the right arm pit. Everything suddenly on the right: Kidney spasms, migraine, sweating‑malaise, semi-disorientation. I felt like I had everything. What happened to my happy organs?

Another report said it was rampant Tasmanian wort virus. "I just don't know," said Nurse Practitioner Wrack, after reading the lab results on my stools―of all the inexact and misleading names for a sample of shit on a dipstick. I think those forest mold mutations up in the rain forest got to me, and biochemical weapons pollution got to me, not to mention a few farm chemicals spicing the underground springs, a lifetime of additives, a lifetime of preservatives, hormone injections in the sweetbreads―of all the lies about eating someone's thymus―I think earthquake‑unleashed molds and viruses got to me, and lead waste, nuclear waste, alder tree pollen and record-breaking grass pollen levels eating my apparently cellophane-like immune‑system shelter, thirty years of deodorant fumes, maybe an eyedropper of the million pounds of PCBs General Electric poured into the Hudson River reached me in the rain, in the drinking water, in the surf, or the fish in my Fishwhich—could've been the antibiotics in my London Broil, nuclear submarine leakage, chlorinated salmon, E-colical butt‑powder residues rising from river sediment, plastic waste, hairspray and feminine hygiene nutrient fallout, oil rig and tanker spillage in the water, the air, the everything—it gets to you—a life of flu‑like symptoms—so far.

Doctors. Daily tubs of spring drinking water and the habits of a satyr took the killing flame out of my skin flute.

And, in fact, I was in my next fertility. At first I thought: I can't do it, I'm too out of it, man I'm really sick, I'm staying in bed, don't ask me to come out for anything, not with this nail‑bag face, not with my right lung that waited too long for the industrial exhaust and cigarette compulsion pay‑off—and I thought I missed that boat, I thought I missed that boil.

More and no more and more—in spite of the lack of rations, the lack of coupons, the lack of prescriptions, the absence of incriminating records, the absence of recommendations, the complete invisibility of my network.

In that next such as it was fertility, I was one of eleven people that endured the lecture "On Ducks, Buttons and Gender in Chaucer" at the state university. And that, just after seeing my first ochra flower. It grew inside a fallen‑off rotted‑through bough of a tree, the particular seed blown inside, particular flowering in there with minimal light, always the minimal, always only that cipher of a portion needed or permitted, that flowering in there, in damp leaf rot. Fertility-schmerfelity, I never would mean hope by saying any of this. Usually I was too busy offering myself up to the managers of liquidation, the Vice President of Higher Standards, the Acacademic Administrative Impresario of Appropriate Body Language, the little emperors determining the lunch‑break, the cigarette‑break, the over‑time schedule, the non‑increase of wages, expendable holidays; that is, the entire asshole brigade.

Just another version of the repetition of predictable, mostly, but not always, minimal, but by current standards extremely minimal hardship I strolled in, the usual things stirred up, my crude temper not a complete waste in all those strangle‑hold situations, some instinct at least saved me a little so I didn't totally stumble in a trance. So the wrong number came up and I played it—that chaos—and not the first time—and no matter who is in office. You offer yourself up, or else.

Back then I was usually too chaotic to tell the difference—glad to have a few joints, a lover, some Blanc de Blanc, a job making me enough money to get back on the road—and reading of all people throughout this period, and just before this period, the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, I don't know how many times—but never knowing—never—such a little luxury as to read him purely touching the 1920's and early 1930's of his conflicted euphoria. My Lorca pages always turned—rifle butt in my mind, held in my mind by the Spanish fag‑bashing Nazi Church assassins that got him. And got him.

I was resetting floor joists for Dint Construction—insect‑mandibled sweating into my dust mask, coiling with shop lights, barely able to pull back my forearm to swing a hammer or to finger around for nails in that tight space to set clips for the new wood—the same week they found mass children's graves in the Morazon Province, El Salvador—infanticide's morticians apprenticed at paramilitary camps in Georgia. What's happening to us now? What a subterranean space—all rotted from the ants—spilled ant eyes, nearly subatomic ant balls, antennae and abdomens cracked off. I found the queen under there—saw her corpse. This is what the time with the dead queen was like. While I was under the house they blared Cannonball Adderly outside the crawl space—Yusef Lateef they blared—they blared Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Costello, they turned up The Clash—all to shoot up the distraction. We just kept calling for more wood—you let ants eat so much, then you go in. And Federico Garcia Lorca suddenly unimpressive to me on my back in the pinched space staring into insect corpses and rot at forty—Federico Garcia Lorca with his Chinese lanterns and cricket's clothing—in those threads and with that light it was a world unknown to me, kept from me, overlooked by me.

And those lanterns are inept—you need 200 watt shop lights under there. Where I was at. I'm not stupid about the gift of being euphorically exquisite or elegiac when I think of Federico Garcia Lorca—but I couldn't even begin to be after what Lorca did—call it sour fumes, call it lost luck, everything coming down, every effort in the midst of it to realize again it was all leading to the wrong end, that is, an unpleasurable end, one of the ends, one end of the end or another. And I was trying to make a testimony about it that wasn't unreal.

Lorca's poems, Dint with his buck teeth...I was a little more open after white wine, 2‑3 days of it, 2‑3 days after the dry rot‑floor‑joist replacement job, with no work after it. 2‑3 sunsets 3‑8‑89 to 3‑11‑89 made all color raw.

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DEALING WITH THE INSOMNIA SURF

Would like it if I thawed more than I did— broke the ice out of my ears more and to have reversed the chain‑saw mood swings a little sooner. Would like to have found at least a few more openings to myself easier to get to, and not so many spools of wire to get undone, and less hang‑ups in general, less razor lath and snow up my symbolic ass. And a little less panic, wherever that comes from. And what is it? Where does it go? And fewer boils, less hair leaving me less, less of all that. While I'm at it I could've had better lungs. When I had the worst coughing—getting born haunted me, and a few times when I couldn't get it up...getting born haunted me.

Sat there watching the insomnia surf the station broadcasted at the end of its programming, and I was coughing out my lungs that never fit the curves of their raunchy slippers the right way. You can just drop off in the middle of some new insomnia or bronchial fit, impossible to read through or write your way out of, I thought, staring at filmitized waves slithering in to a CBS-Christianity string‑music sound‑track, just drop off, one day with all of it no longer just temporarily but completely out of range; one day, looking down, the map out in front of you, the ocean and the religious music on the insomnia station; one day, out‑of‑it, and noticing the nails are longer; one day, one, any day after a certain day whatever the proctologist, urologist, erectologist, cardiologist or the ball-cheese and eyebrowologist read from their findings on most of my essential parts.

And there must've been others watching the taped surf and listening to the recorded string sounds, some of them serious and repentant for whatever it was they fucked up and couldn't stop doing or couldn't keep buried, and some of them just sick of themselves and unable to sleep. And there had to be at least a few people with enough good circulation who also must have been naked while watching the water and listening to the surf and the strings.

And I would like to have been a little less dim‑witted. For one thing, I would like to have more sincerely thanked that old Lebanese grandmother stranger smiling through facial sores, many pit holes and voluminous cheek hair, her language—I could barely understand a thing. About a week after we moved in next door she handed the plate of elaborately-braided-honey-and-pistachio-stuffed powdered cookies over the fence to me; and I realize now, eleven years too late, it was a welcoming.

And I would liked to've been less obsessed with filling in all of the invalid days. Therefore, I'm starting right out sending my apologies, first of all, to the Albino Farm we drove through terrorizing—honking our horn for the raising of hell for the hell of it and did and no one said shit out there to five fifteen‑and‑six teen‑year‑old asshole punks in a '55 Buick so ancient, so completely incongruent, and out of it with the current taste and style, and so worn the paint was blurred into a muted beige and rust color—and that car must've been to them, and was intended to give the impression of being to everyone, something demonic. Demonic-moronic. Sure it was.

Definitely would like there to have been more times I hadn't slept for crap, and so often, in Santa Monica, Athens, Portland, Bortland, Van Nuys, Indian Chasm, Witches Hole, Mill Valley, Duck Dick Beach, San Raphael, Zurich above the Floo‑Floo bar, Florence in the Mosquiotes Whore House, Rectumile Dumps, Sharp Knife, Salt Lake, Paris with a sweat sock full of hashish, Goo Flats, Aureole Meadows, or at The Waverly Manor, Ville d'Igor, especially in Rhythymnon among the rocks the donkeys the olives and the cock‑worshipping goddess and the womb‑worshipping goddess, or at Big Shoe Mountain, Condom Heights, Condom Flats, Orange Bowl, Dust Bowl, Blue Balls Lane, Blue Balls Drive, Blue Balls Everywhere, Hot Gun, Laguna Beach, you name it, in tents, in pensions, in sleeping bags, in apartments and in homes that were not like apartments or homes in towns that were not like towns known by customs even weird customs not like our customs, but older, before these housing tracks of the architecturally eerie, post‑world war two slap'em together junk hole simalucrumic structures most live in…at best.

I think there were enough all night hash 'n' wine levitating out of depression confessionals and enough bitter recriminations. Plenty of those. Glad that's over. 

In a dream, I was talking to a shoelace. I was talking to an extra beard. It was part of the mind making muteness recognizable. I hope. So much is still mute in me. I was talking to football equipment. The mute. I was dressed as a Ram in those pads/in that helmet. I was a nine year-old Ram in the padded jersey and hard helmet gear, a ram sweeping over a field alone, catching the snow in my curved headgear yellow antler spirals.

Then I lived in a mosquito, somewhere near the antennae; then I was too close to the stinger, I wondered how far off I was from the digestive canal, I didn't want any of that dung or blood that wasn't mine mixed with my blood. The dream was telling me I'm not who I think I am, and I don't live where I think I do; that is, not in any definite designation. The dream was telling me it will tamper with my mail whenever it likes. And how can I not envy what it does? And I don't resent feeling that envy.

The last time I realized I was going to have to look at everything I would like to have thawed from more—I walked onto a boat headed for Corfu. And you can just keep going. Why shouldn't you? The last time—I had to dig a hole with one lung tied behind my back—it was part of the dream telling me the air is impossible to breathe at home, it was also part of the dream telling me about breathing in two worlds, as well as the clear fact that it was part of the mind warning me to "watch out for your vital organs, Jack."

But it was also just the design of twos, the islands Crete and Corfu, the ships the Athene and the Ariadne, the inner lung and the other. I thaw some of this and some of that, not everything's the insomnia surf, not everything's a rock turd wall you have to break through. I celebrate what I can: Cinderella's slipper tree, the surrealism of the outer lung, fanfares and nipples, and the design of twos, worn and Dorn, L and D, two ships, Untitled and Untitled.

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PINKY OF LOS ANGELES, HIS RITES OF PASSAGE

There I was like my uncle Hal but with my own money-clip, lighter than his, of course, and not as gold, but telling my own stories about getting screwed or not-so-screwed, or not screwed enough. I cracked my knuckles and showed my nephew― like Hal showed my brother and me—the way you deal a card off the bottom of the deck. Five-foot-five 200 lb. John Garfield-intensity aluminum awning salesman.  Or the memory constricts again, and it was his double two years younger always bragging about a strange skirt for every week he was on the road selling what he called "baby cages," some kind of playpen that converted into a highchair. He sold the contraptions driving a hundred and fifty California miles a day for money, for strange skirts, for who knows what in his chain-smoking solitude interstate driving and driving, squat Jew boy with hair combed like Fats Domino.

February, with my money clip and a few cards for gas, for identity, or if I break down.  Pinky, what L. started to call me after I severed a stringy nerve below my right pinky when some reciprocating saw bastard jumped my hand in a tight space while I cut back lath and plaster from ceiling joists. My one miserable injury in fifteen years of demolition and construction. Therefore, Pinky, the one who didn't see—one time and one time is always enough—one time too many waiting to screw my self over up there behind the torn-back lath: Pinky the distracted, Pinky the covered with plaster dust, Pinky the blind side.

There I was, 1985, Pinky of Los Angeles in one of his 833 new and old rites of passage, and still counting. It was around that time, that February, I heated up with a lingering virus that makes people want to yell around the ten-month mark. For male cats it is the virus for ear swelling, whisker frigidity, genital leaking, and room-evacuating odor. Then I made the humming bird connection.

*

Everything said from this point on comes out of the connection to my dreams, my facts, my symbols, my data. But I needed shoes again, I needed rations of mostoccolli, I needed the fish net body stocking with a split-crotch she always says she will wear, but doesn't. Above all, eventually, I needed to stop kicking myself in the balls (an effort much easier to do than it sounds). And above the above all, I needed to give up looking for answers from different sides of the same stupid coin, I needed to term a new coin, I needed to touch creepy Velcro as little as possible. My dreams, my facts, my symbols, my data. In February, the bad-skin month. The shorter orgasms month. You know that Chinese poem ending: "If you don't draw from a well every day, it will dry up"? I found that kind of well in 1990, not that my previous or current wells were dry—but the one I'm talking about had a foul syrup building up inside. And I had no plans, not even in February, month of the Neapolitan bone-aching fever, I had absolutely no plans to lose my way to that well, not Pinky the Stumbler, Pinky the Card Shark, Pinky whose gurus have been known to be his wife's transparent stockings, beans without lard, the blood orange of a Bradford pear leaf.  Not Pinky the Martyr of Trifles, the Mystic of Trifles, the Creator of Trifles. Pinky whose deity is the hummingbird. Pinky the Money Clip Robbins had no plan to mess up his connection to that well, wells like that don't just fly into the ground from nowhere, that's the only well he's got.

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SUBDORN THE SAILOR

Nature can kill you—look at Ahab, vengeance made him lopsided. "As if a man did flee from a lion and a bear met him." And that ain't the way—that ain't the way. Most of it ain't the way. Nature, not a whale, killed Ahab. His nature.

He wasn't Ahab or one of his likenesses, though we're all his bastards more or less. He was just a little Subdorn the Sailor for a while. In Athens before the tiny epiphany on the island of Crete for a while. Some people took low wages and kept their mouths shut for a while. Some people shot protestors and strikers for a living for a while. Some people shot heroin in their eyes for a while when they ran out of veins for a while. For odious henchmenesque uniforms and mediocre but adequate amounts of food some people ran over student demonstrators with tanks when they had to. Some people left infant Chinese girls to die from exposure off roadsides not just because there wasn't enough rice for a while. The explanations were not humanly memorable. Some teachers taught Death Squad 101 at a fort in old American Georgia and a few other forts we won't know about until some future declassified time, for quite a while.  Some people said, "there are reasons, " but those reasons were omens.

He worked a lot of shit jobs cooking in restaurants to make it over to Greece for a while. He felt the numbness over there, the commonplace sense of ruin from the military coup seven years before, the matter-of-fact tolerance for the cover‑up and body‑count for a while. That was the Athens he was in for a while, with memory and writing and the Tyrants' hatred of both. And the smog was eating up the pentellic marble of the Parthenon for a while, all that industrial vehicle waste eating the hats of police, star jasmine, the already crushed shirt‑collars of the vendors, metallic dust eating the stone eyelids of Athena and the tropical‑fish‑ blue eyelids of the whores, all the while. And the archaeologists had official plans to encase the Parthenon in glass, and that would be just the solution for a while. And the military that helicoptered the several hundred something dead bodies of students and protesters to remote islands in the Aegean after the military take-over, would supply the equipment necessary for as long as long a while as it was needed. The Athenian newspapers with their hatred of writing reported 18 dead because it was only mandatory to report the deaths of foreigners, ever and all the while. Some kind of loathsome world for a while. Our personal and collective little while, together or alone. Some students, some natives, some peasants, some labor organizers wouldn't be able to resist labor-slavery, Diet Coke, and E.T for a long Western while.  Because the faster the better, the cheaper the better in the factories, in the shops, in the barracks, in the mines, on the pipelines, in the rain forests, and on the farms. Old half-ass Democracy Athens, of all the cities for a Subdorn the Sailor to twist himself into and then begin to see it a little more clearly and recall it a little more patiently after a while.