I really like Christopher Robin's stuff. Funny, elegant, sad poems. Good poems. Christopher is from Santa Cruz, California and he publishes one of the two or three best poetry magazines in the country. Aptly titled Zen Baby, you can get a copy by sending a couple bucks to PO Box 1611, Santa Cruz CA 95061.








Poetry By Christopher Robin

Xerox Sprint

How will we interpret
This reluctant American incarnation?
This wasteland of cells and shortcomings…
Low budget/unfinished holograms
Shoot across scarred bellies/
Unholy canvases/
Bodies we can’t translate-
In here
That check will never be cashed
In here
Punk rock beats gurgle up through the toilet
And mix with surrealism
At the cracklin’ Mic
This is a carnival of bullshit
The cops are right outside
Trying to make the distinction between
Those with a poem
And those without
But how can they tell?
We get:
Walt Whitman tattoos
And Emily Dickinson enemas
Buy old cars
Collect typewriters
Join MySpace/
Cell-phoned
Or chopping-wood
Celibate
Or sexually-panicked
Unmade beds smelling of schemes…
Some of us fast/
And some just sit still
to wait for the wine
To bring a supernatural dawn/
picked last for the team
or not picked at all
Some of us will break out
Off the beer/off the dole
Most of us won’t
My ink is an eternal sprint
Across these Xeroxed outsider pages
My friends and I are headlines
In the papers no one reads-
Moving so fast through the living
I fear boredom more than death
And I refuse to sleep-
The lumbering old trains pass us by
Singing their graffitied-death-rattle
while we sling emails
with lightning irrelevance-
in the city/honor what kills you
or say uncle


GIVE US A LAP DANCE-THE END IS NEAR!

The future’s givin’ a lap dance but luckily it’s too dark to see the wrinkles

so stand at attention feel that red, white and blue pride swell

She’s got two bad eyes a sore on her lip Destiny is browbeaten hunkered down ready to one up herself

She ain’t got nothin’ on Hitler, Mussolini, Cheney, DOES she?

Please board now the ship they told us would never sink

is sinking AGAIN but the sunset is amazing the record is skipping

the champagne has been pissed in so many times the universal joke IS embalmed

Worm eaten PASSE

Nobody’s laughin’ the parties been over since the first stone was ever hurled

We are limping towards our own execution the corners of our mouths clipped in irony

practiced in black-lit mirrors reading Spin Magazine

and what a story this will make!

Where we can link our ‘elevated yellow” PANIC? and government sanctioned

Obliteration?

Is there a chat-room appropriate to make THE BIGGEST SPLASH?

Big Brother’s flipping our switches our DNA

The CIA swims in our blood

but popularity doesn’t matter anymore (until there’s a uniformed pounding at the door) right?

any more than GIANT TSUNAMI’S AND HURRICANES AND RUNNING OUT OF gasoline matter-right?

Adam and Eve don’t look beyond my fig leaf!

Whenever I FUCK Barbie and Ken have lived in vain!

But I’ll never have a car with a sun-roof anyway

as long as the Black Power movement is still treading water

MTV: what does the taste of bile reveal about 90 pound ‘girls going wild’? I’ve never seen it on the newsreel….

Retching sounds in the Women’s Studies class retching sounds on Spring Break…..

But don’t blame this generation

illiterate but downloading-all-the-deeper-meanings–plastic-band-of-cyber-monkeys….


with my phone unplugged
I get the news in my sleep via karmic reruns of a century imploding on itself

All those hometown leg-less boys could be sitting on barstools right now watching

football games holding the women’s movement back fifty years

Or shooting deer instead of Iraqi’s

my heroes will go AWOL or bomb Wall Street

But what do I know about bringing down empires? I have barely the fortitude
To tie my own shoes!

I HAVE BEEN DECLARED INCOMPETENT! ‘Born to Lose’? my planned

obsolescence was planned by me

it’s all quicksand

this American dream

and we are all at this very moment NOWHERE TO BE FOUND

praise be to Allah for that


Clown Fish

I can’t work
I’ve dedicated this day
to snapping my fingers
and singing a chorus
with the last
heartbeat of the world
I’m a carnie animal
ugly jack
skipping over minefields
of loose synapses
a broken headed
professional bumbler
by trade
gender mutant
of the sensual circus
lilting ghost radio
in my nerves
of a zig zagging
carefree
pony-tailed girl
who I loved with
such impossible belief
I asked her to please grow up
and leave me
in the loop
of the eternal summer 8-Track
with an endless boyhood sky
and no mothers calling me home
the dummy of the furious walk
searching for an ill defined mysticism
promised to me
when the world
fell out of my skull
I dream the numbers
I own the make believe
but I can’t find a nickel
to scratch the sunshine
out of this winning day