ROBIN WYATT DUNN - POEMS

​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.

---

No easy marriage,
Nor any restitution,
in the blockade of the senses under the american night.
Step out, and smell the scenery
Pasteboard and gravitas and weed
A steed made out of steel
And my wheel, cut from my wife,
Running wild over my hand.
 
Our marriage is to one another,
Every tree and rock.
Palpable;
August;
Skewed over the day by the missile sightings.
 
Launch with me our thermonuclear deterrent,
To stop the divorce from reality.
Our bequeathement is rich;
The richest dowry,
A quintessence of poems,
Gnawing out your heart:
 
Come with me to the barricades of pixels,
and to our own eyes,
blinking,
shuddering,
under the white light of our own sun:
 
Each the inheritor of the government
Armed with the greatest nukes
The largest armies
The mightiest bombs and soldiers with knives and ropes and saws and teeth
Filled with universities
Marching in time to Mozart themes and Radiohead timpanis scalding the water of the heart,
Take heed over the lightning for our curse,
Made in lead,
Cut into lead and pushed into the Tiberian walls,
of our slow and silent revolution.


                                                                      ***

the city prisons each its thought
no churning deference
no holy day
its towers rise even in dreams
no ruin can diminish its intent
no lurid god may move its embrace
from around your soul
 
it reaches over the years
over your eyes
celebrating your divinity
your mind and place
 
the shadow of your ordinal coordinates
mapped in time
under the stone moss
 
no holiday removes its years
no holocaust may burn its eyes
it sees you forever


                                                                    ***


no rich font of spent diodes curling off my hair
no spiraling disease, warm to the touch
no smarting eye
bent over the city within you
 
take on the whole;
they circle its edge
you as black hole
moving down into music
 

                                                                     ***

Little Clarendon
 
Now I remember
Who I was
A boy at Oxford
 
No cattle nor mass
No class
 
Just a bully with my books
Looking for the bigger guy to punch out with my knife eyes
So many
 
Fortress of bullies
In black and white
 
Guiding their oxen through the water
Sighting men through their eyes
And willing them to bind their hands
To the pyre
 
Sending its signal over the counties and countries
"Heretics, come here!"
"For we shall burn you better"



                                                                         ***
​
spend my bird
under the envelope of your mercury
hoard horrid and entombed bright brittle corridors of light:
 
teach my children the bird
who strikes the night
burning
churning
worlding the day out of his might
exacticon revenge
lurid dreams shaking their midnight soil over the gravity of eons
climbing the rope
to the treehouse
and swinging over the void