Doren Robbins

Untitled Surf Condition

1

Could have thawed more than I did. Had the chance. Broke the ice out of my ears, reversed the chain saw mood swings more. Fewer hang ups. The general design. Less razor lath and snow up my symbolic ass. Less panic. Wherever that comes from. What is it? Where does it dissolve? Fewer boils. Less hair leaving me less. When I had the worst coughing getting born haunted me. When I couldn’t get it up. Getting born haunted me.

Insomnia surf station. The anterior broadcast. End of programming. The coughing, the lungs, they never fit the curves of their raunchy slippers. You can just drop off in the middle of insomnia or a bronchial fit. Impossible to read through or write your way out of it. CBS-Christianity filmitized waves, string music sound track. One day no longer temporarily completely out of range. Looking at the map in front of you. One day against decided motion. Noticing the nails are longer. Any day after a certain day whatever the proctologist urologist erectologist cardiologist or ball-cheese and eyebrow-ologist read in their findings on your essential parts. Watching taped surf religious hymns chorus and waves. There had to be others with enough good circulation also sitting up naked listening to the surf string music pan-electric TV cogs. Some of them serious. Repentant. Whatever it was they left in pieces couldn’t stop doing couldn’t keep buried. Sick of responding. Invalid days. In The Albino Farm documentary they drove through woods honking raising hell for the hell of it. Five fifteen and sixteen-year-old punks in a ‘55 Buick so worn the paint was a muted beige rust blur. That car intended to give the impression of being something demonic. Demonic-moronic. Sure it was. Last program aired Himalayan Spider Monkeys documentary. A human ranger approaching them where he shouldn’t have. They growled menacingly. Barked and defecated. One urinated in his direction and threw branches toward the intruder. None willfully attacked. One of their skeletons hangs in a museum in Oklahoma.

2

Slept bad in Santa Monica, Athens, Portland, Bortland, Van Nuys, Indian Chasm, Witches Hole, Mill Valley before there were bridges, Duck Dick Beach, Jump Off Joe Creek, San Raphael, Zurich above the Floo Floo bar, Florence in the Mosquitoes’ Whore House, no sleep after the ride that let us out in Death Valley, 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, also at Big Shoe Mountain, irretrievable in Rhythimnon among the rocks, the donkeys, the olives, the cock worshipping goddess and the womb worshipping goddess, Condom Heights, Condom Flats, Orange Bowl, Dust Bowl, in the back of my truck, Blue Balls Lane, Blue Balls Drive, Blue Balls Everywhere, Hot Gun, Laguna Beach, you name it, in tents, in pensions, sleeping bags, apartments and homes that were not like apartments or homes in towns that were not like towns known by customs even weird customs identical to our customs, but older, before these housing tracks architecturally eerie post World War Two junk hole simalucrumic structures most live in. At best. Enough all-night hash and wine levitating mutual depression confessionals, enough recrimination relieved exits to go on, enough with Hades the Disco, all scorpions, disfigured humans, mentally truncated humans, the hand-cuffed drunk mother and human hyena on his hind legs next to her, the hammer clanging frozen wood up your elbow brain.

3

I was talking to a shoelace. I was talking to an extra beard. The dream cogs making muteness recognizable. The reconciled, partly mute. I was talking to football equipment. The mute. I dressed as a Ram under synthetic cloth, plastic pads and helmet. A nine-year-old Ram sweeping over a field alone, catching the snow in my curved head gear, yellow antler spirals. I lived in a mosquito. Below the antennae. I was too close to the stinger. The digestive canal lock-down. His dream monitor telling him you’re not who you think you are. You don’t live where you think you do. No definite designation. It’ll tamper with your mail whenever it likes. How can I not envy what it does and not resent feeling that envy without resentment. To rest and unrest in that angle. Mounting and collaborating.

Last time I had to look at everything I needed to thaw from I walked onto a boat headed for Corfu. You can just keep walking. Why shouldn’t you? The last time I had to dig a hole with one lung tied behind my back. The dream telling me the air is impossible to breathe at home. The dreamer breathing in two atmospheres. The design of twos. The islands Crete and Corfu. The ships Athene and Ariadne. The inner lung and the other. I thaw from some of this next to some of that. A day not everything’s a rock turd wall you have to break through. You celebrate what you can––Cinderella’s slipper tree, the surrealism of the outer lung, the mouse in your boot, fanfares and nipples, the design of twos, worn and Dorn, L and D, two ships, Untitled and Untitled.

Doren Robbins’ is a poet, mixed media artist, and educator. His art and written works have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Angry Old Man, Another Chicago Magazine, Exquisite Corpse, 5AM, Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, Lana Turner, Miramar, New Letters, Nimrod, Otoliths, Salt and Sulfur. His books have been awarded the Blue Lynx Poetry Award 2001 and the 2008 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Poetry Award.
In 2021 Spuyten Duyvil Press published Sympathetic Manifesto, Selected Poems 1975-2015.