ROBIN WYATT DUNN - NARCOWRITER

​Robin Wyatt Dunn lives in a state of desperation engineered by late capitalism, within which his mind is a mere subset of a much larger hallucination wherein men are machines, machines are men, and the world and everything in it are mere dreams whose eddies and currents poets can channel briefly but cannot control. Perhaps it goes without saying that he lives in Los Angeles.

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NARCOWRITER
EXCERPT

​Who judges the name of men; separates its teeth from its head; its memories from its habitations; its blood from its death? Who makes the herd spur left under rock; summons wisdom for the arrival of the enemy; groks the light? Who judges the name of men;  forming it watchful; locking it and marring its face, to go aground with its tumbled graces, consonants into the syllabary? Who wakes the demon of our fierce love, no nearer absence than its groan, no hereafters but its embrace? Who judges love to mean what it does? And who negotiates its absence under the creekbeds and sounds of my wakefulness, sweat dust and wind? Who judges the name of men; without their direction; without their need; hinting at their desire under the dragon of the fall; so near; and nearer; who names men under the dragon rhyming his face with the teeth; who cloaks his children and lovers in the name of the creekbed, in the skeleton of the ancestors?
 
Who can judge the name of men; nearer always; keeping the meaning terrible and close; bombmaker; epitaph breaker; thrower of stones?
 
Who judges the name of men to creep soundlessly under my head;  dominating my passions; serving my will; arbitrating my body like the sea from the continent; aging the memory of our keeping for some distillation, or communicator; path through sea.
 
We do.
 
I judge the name of men an oath; rock and stone; ash and current; waking and dreaming; walking under the force of time; no never making the wind wreak, for it is we who wreak under its balcony, as the raft; nearing the hesitancy of my desire.
 
We can judge; winter the present under the shelter of the past until there is no more of it; and then we must move.