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. 

***

​what can we tell each other when we're dead
the sliding glass door of fate
sinking in to dread
the night and willpower's resistance

the grace to find the light and need
shirking the burning fork of your endurance
to burn within
the naked hour of the brine
shaking its power in droplets from its body

***

​now with burning
the tired and tremulous shattering
not quite--

the excision of the laundry list of bright spots and burns
scattered over the oasis
lecherous delays
time gaps and winters
the knuckled furl of your voice
embittered

we can count the ways to know you
tracking back through the minutes
looking for the doorway out:

some shield from the floor of the world
where you were sighing

***

​the delicious tripe
tucked careful beneath the whip
where the calls whine round the light shining out
from the theater

on the brink:

the naked liquid fire
curls under my lip
a kiss

the naked flame of the temple
under my heel

***

​the patience of the dark
shimmers underneath the morning
waiting for you to kiss its face

the soldiers glimmer underneath their paint
watching and waiting for the fragment of your eye beneath the pupil
to tighten

***

the pale weight of the light shines against my head
the fever's bled delight and bread into my skin
like my enemies rejoice upon the field,
the sinking sins of streets and alleys bind to my feet
embracing

the narrow weight of each incision in the day
step into the breach beneath the air over the cement
to cut the net
or merely step away:

some broken branch of the orchestra is warbling out its song of destruction
an army of miscreants marking the tide with their every beat
south to the sea

​