JANE MARLA ROBBINS - POEMS

JANE MARLA ROBBINS is a finalist for a CAPS Grant in Poetry from the National Endowment of the Arts, and is the author ofPoems of The Laughing Buddha, four of which you can see and hear her read on YouTube by going to:  www.youtube.com/Poemsof the Laughing Buddha. And you can hear her read four poems from Café Mimosa in Topanga by going to:www.youtube.com/Café Mimosa in Topanga. Commissioned by the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. to write and perform the one-woman play, Reminiscences of Mozart by His Sister, Jane also performed it at Lincoln Center in New York. Her one-woman play in verse, Miriam’s Dance, about Moses’ sister, was produced in New York and Los Angeles. Her most recent play, A Radical Friendship, a two-hander about Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Heschel, has been seen in New York and Los Angeles starring Ed Asner.  Jane’s best-selling self-help book, Acting Techniques for Everyday Life: Look and Feel Self-Confident in Difficult Real-Life Situations won the Gold Axiom Business Book Award.  She gives workshops on Performing your Poetry.  For more information go to www.janemarlarobbins.com

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​ YOU THINK I “MADE IT UP?”
 

​Right, I wanted the feeling of cockroaches
inside my skin when someone, lover, doctor,
anyone, might suddenly touch me,
as if my soul weren’t screaming
like every other, somewhere to be touched –
Monkeys die for Chrissake if they aren’t touched.
 
Who would choose betrayal
deep in the bones, fearing everyone,
not knowing it, for years, from a summer
so long ago?
 
Sure I made it up, to be in therapy,
windows with no light, writhing,
screaming through a black hole,
when life’s about rejoicing.
 
You want me to have made it up,
so you wouldn’t have to think
that such things happen, people lost,
helpless, hopeless?

Sure I did, to blacken
the family name, add shame to injury.
Sure, to feel in my bones, in my cells,
the terror, disgust, and wanting to die.
Sure I made it up.
 
I wish I had.

​HE TOUCHED ME AND I FROZE

​Do I relive the myth?
The men arrive, Apollos, Zeuses
disguised as business men,
photographers, and I, like Daphne,
turn into a tree
solid, speechless, immobile.
Molested at three,
my sap feels fear and freezes.
 
And yet if men are gods
then I will be a goddess,
and if they want to want me,
touch me, kiss,
I won’t be Daphne’s laurel tree,
I’ll be a garden, no, an orchard,
no, a forest strong and dancing.
And myself as well --
Shape Changer like the gods.

​ROBIN WILLIAMS, UNFINISHED

The diseases stop
   as at bus stops
      at various stages of the cross.
 
My friends are educated 
   in what well might be
      their journeys’ end,
 
The great comedian
   Robin Williams
      diagnosed with Lewy Body
 
Its finished painting
   imagined in his mind
      (no wit, no memories)
 
‘Til it’s hard not to chose
    to skip the stops
      go right to the end,
 
Finished.
 

​FEELING PRETTY
  
i

​Too dangerous. Grampa’s eyes
glazed across the dinner table,
ghoul’s grin at the window,
then a dollar pushed in my fist.
My father reveled at his father’s shine
when he threw me in the air like a toy.
 
Better to be ugly, be so fat
no one can see me, or if they can,
they’re repulsed, hide inside dresses
straight and hard as cardboard boxes.
 
Science understands that feeling pretty
soars our oxytocin
while another hormone strengthens up
our immune systems.
So though feeling ugly
may feel safe, it will never make me
really strong or well.

ii

​Men whistled,
workmen on scaffolds hooted,
men oogled in bookstores
I cut them cold.
 
I should have been happy, was instead
afraid, nauseous.
I never thought to think
They’re not my grampa.
Think of all the fun I missed.

​GRAMPA
 
i

​Did you think it
FUN for me
your sticky juice
all over my mouth?
 
Cut off the penis,
 slice it up,
feed it to the pigs.
 
Clorox my mouth
let in cool water,
rose water and honey.
 

​ii

​Into my anus
your partial fingers groped.
Blood instead of tears.
 
With a sharp knife chop off
the probing, pushing fingers
fry them up,
chuck them into the slop;
 
and my new anus:
let it be an orchid,
a cherished doorway
letting out the browning
leaves.
 
 

iii

​How could I not imagine the police
slapping you up against a wall
turning you around
screeching down your pants, cutting it off,
shoving it in your mouth?
 
Let you feel how I felt
a little girl in a strange hotel room,
innocent lips tasting semen,
when they were supposed to be
singing.
 
 

iv

​Sixty years later, Grampa,
I imagine the Russia of your youth:
I see you, nine or ten,
finger parts cut off at the mill,
makeshift closing of wounds
the other boys taunting.
An older teenager pushes you
against a wall, enters from behind.
 
Today, strangely, it seems easier
to feel your pain than the pain
of the three year old girl you molested
decades later in America.