Academic Retreat

 

bland ennui

podium drones

chittering cadres

splintering styrofoam

 

blank figures

tedium’s bones

self-referential

legume enumerators

 

blunt stylus

medium’s cones

somnolent sputter

dreary enervation

 

by William B. Robison   

   

 

Divine Confection

 

Once my mother made a big plate of divinity

and I said to my brother, bet you can’t eat just one.

Well, we fell out laughing, thinking about the time when

we bought a bag of chips from the sexy checkout girl

and kept making jokes coming home from the grocery

 

cracking up and wondering how the Lays lady lays

with a cautious nod to the copyright attorney

and all due apologies to Mister Bob Dylan,

though a man who makes his living from clever wordplay

can hardly complain whenever it crops up elsewhere.

 

That’s especially true because he dropped his real name

for his birth certificate reads Robert Zimmerman

and I wonder: what if his favorite poet were

Robert Frost instead of the thirsty Dylan Thomas,

unstoppering by a snowy wood when he got dry?

 

Would he now be Robert Robert, and wouldn’t people

have confused him early on with Robbie Robertson?

Or perhaps to avoid that, he would have a nickname:

not Boss or King or Slowhand, but something evoking

a singer of poetry—maybe Oral Roberts

 

But, oops, that would be even worse because there is that

pompadoured Oklahoma preacher, once the healer

of arthritic elbows and the occasional plague

of boils afflicting the odd Old Testament martyr

to whom Bildad appeared with a shopping cart laden

 

with lizards, locusts, and stinging scorpions and said

Take this, Job, and shove it, but the tiny wheels bogged down

in sand, leaving him lamenting to leprous laymen

I’ll bet you this never happened to Jeremiah!

Meanwhile, in the eighties, Dylan found the messiah

 

But it was floral moral Oral who said he saw 

a hundred foot Jesus saying: raise me more geetus.

Now, I’m no dyspeptic skeptic, but I’ve never seen

Jesus at all, though I feel his presence at Christmas

Still, if his standing height in yards was the same as his

 

age when he hung on the cross, you could get him to hold

up your TV antenna, and I’ll bet you would get 

immaculate reception. Of course I’d be cautious,

though I’m not sacrilegious, about standing too close

for fear of the lightning . . . but really I’m not worried

 

If God hurled thunderbolts like mythical Zeus, He might

take a shot at preachers for profit, who fudge truth and

fiddle the books like Nero selling fire insurance

But God lets us make our  mistakes and have some fun, too

Ben Franklin, our frequently foundering father, said

 

beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us

to be happy, and I would hasten to agree, though

Franklin’s faith was not my own, for he was mere Deist

not a Eucharistic fellow with chips for his brew

and thus never tasted my Mother’s divinity

 

by William B. Robison 

   

 

Dry

 

boney anorexic soul has no breath

no intake at all, its exhalation

is only the gasp of the punctured corpse

 

stake in the breast of the vampire yielding

a pitiful puff of fetid staleness

even the putrefaction half-hearted

 

too little essence for a full-fledged stink

skin like the sun-dried membrane of bat’s wings

stretched out thinly over bones so tightly

 

that a pinprick, unleashing fierce surface

tension, might fling fleshless flaps skittering

o’er skeleton, ripped cello-wrap beating

 

hasty retreat from desiccated meat

balloon stuff fraying round a vacuum void

vaporless vault of the leathery shrew

 

no sweat, no tears, no mucus, no moisture

none of the warm wetness of womanhood

blood congealed, condensed, evaporated 

 

even her venom a fine dry powder

her slithering the sound of sandpaper

scraping crass across a rough surfaced stone

 

so little like women damp with desire

or kissed with chastity’s milder juices

lachrymal in laughter, languor, or lust

 

dabbed, licked, lapped up, but never wiped away

unafraid to lactate, expectorate

perspire, no bleached sinews or oil-less hair

 

breathing visible heat in the chill air

tiny droplets of spirit escaping

ectoplasm distilling its essence

 

lovers soak up this liquor like sponges

in the meantime, seedless, the arid husk

parches in her non-porous poverty

 

by William B. Robison 

   

 

ethicist

 

the woman drinks milk

in a Chinese restaurant

says Derrida is

becoming an ethicist

barely touches her

dish of spicy lobster sauce

crawfish and onions

deconstructed for nothing

 

by William B. Robison 

   

 

Shroud

 

At dusk

in the dirt

near the mouth

of the tomb

lie

the wrappings

of Lazarus

abandoned

in ecstasy

 

A slight figure

scurries

whisks them

away

scrubbing

in the current

till fingertips

are sanguine

spreads them

on a rock

to dry

in the morning

 

Later she

laves

her brother’s bowl

rinses

the cup Martha

left

on the table and

sweeps

up the crumbs

spilled

by her visitor

 

by William B. Robison 

   

 

Troubadour

 

The troubadour has got no horse

so he rides to his gigs on a minstrel cycle

to fortnightly ovations and

all the roast meat he can carry on a dagger

 

The acrobats hang upside down

tumblers half fool, naked juggler vainglorious

fat clowns send up tight wirewalkers

the ragged trampoline springs a trapeze artist

 

In the land Budapest controls

at a mineral spa for well-hung Aryans

Dan’s ignoble Lord of Gdansk

shows his steps to ill cons on Lion Tamer Lane

 

Full tilt a whirling dervish

curves nervously, swerves, observes no perversions but

ecdysiasts in Gaza strip

and Persian rug rats scare Indian elephants

 

Through the door comes the troubadour

jester in the vesture besmirches the churches

misrule measures its meter but

the inverse poet is averse to reverses

 

by William B. Robison 

 

William Robison teaches history at Southeastern Louisiana University; writes about early modern England, including The Tudors in Film and Television with Sue Parrill; is a musician and filmmaker; and has poems accepted by Amethyst Arsenic, amphibi.us, Anemone Sidecar, Apollo’s Lyre, Asinine Poetry, Carcinogenic Poetry, decomP magazinE, Forge, Mayday Magazine, On Spec, and Paddlefish.

 

 

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