John D Robinson is a UK-based poet. Hundreds of his poems have appeared online and in print. He has published 15 chapbooks and four full collections of his poetry. He has published a novel of fiction and 2 collections of short stories. He is a multiple Pushcart nominee.
in high waisted acid
washed jeans & Def Leppard
half shirts
the viaduct girls
give furious
fleeting hand jobs
as the D&H railroad
shoots its load
across the Susquehanna
later they teach us to skip rocks
ducks & drakes, they call it
to further mystify
in a few years
they’re at Vassar or Bryn Mawr
or some other college we can’t pronounce
we stay or leave
or leave & come back
it’s all the same
drinking beer every night
at the Copper Fox
on Water St
nowadays nobody skips rocks
& the train stopped unloading
years ago
Sacred footsteps
of pilgrims and
street PrOphETS
atop
piss-stained lottery tickets and
dirty hypodermics—
like rose petals, strewn
under maidens’ tender feet—
pave the way
to playing card Meccas
beyond doors
to salvation/damnation,
below fiery eyes that cut
the night (and souls) in two
with gazes and blinks
(but never sleep).
Quite the price
to pay
to cross these fickle streams
that run
sacrificial red
with self-severings
of thigh bone and fat,
savory-sweet
and spiced with lotus wine—
offerings
in want of burning
on conjured stages and
electric alters
for Vanity’s spectacle.
How divine
the honied stench
of auto vivisections (splayed out
for all to see),
making followers and
the blue birds that tweet
forget
appetites and tastes for
eyes (for eyes) and teeth (for teeth)—
for the sake of ounces (of fame)
for pounds (of flesh)—
like cold Lethe
and her gentle lapping,
smooth, of jagged rocks
upon Hell’s bitter shores.
Let us pray
(for emergence
from this opiate haze
and a quick flip of the switch).
Amen.
***
Originally published at Cephalopress
Sade’s twenty two
and made of fire
with eyelashes
long enough
to blow wind on your face
if she blinks close to you
Born in the Bermudas
but talks like a Jamaican
I tell her
“You’re my black bitch”
and she slaps me
across the face
When I repeat
my playful insult
she slaps me harder
Am I a masochist?
No, I am not
I am a sadist
I lay Sade on my bed
each night
and she’s fire
in a cold cold soul
I flip her over
like chicken breasts
in the burning pan
I suck on her asshole
as if it’s the formula
that was missing
from when I was a baby
Sade is lust
and mutual bullying,
there’s harmony
in our mutual abuse
Sometimes I don’t know
what she screams at me
her accent is so exotic
but I suckle
on her chocolate nipples
on those caramel-coloured breasts
She says I can’t love
a black girl,
I’m as white as her bed sheets
I tell her I’m a different kind of white
An Albanian white
She says she’s Muslim
I tell her I grew up Muslim
Bektashi Muslim,
I tell her
Allah will strike us both dead
if he happens to see
what I’m about to do to her
this fiery night
She lets me
She lets me
make a sinner
of us both
Under a sky
empty of anything
religious
or moral
As we make
our lustful noise
in a darkness left
from thousands years
of silence from any God,
be it Allah
or Christ
or any other fairytale
people spew on this world
because they were too afraid
to die
or had the luck of
ever meeting a Sade
Sade is a God killer
even if she believes in God
And she sleeps
in my arms
tonight
The prom queen in her skanky tight dress forgetting tonight she is a Catholic Girl
The steamy windows in the back, virginity escaping. Man conquering the Catholic Girl.
They watch her enter for confession; moldy Priests ready to judge what he longs for
Repent! Repent! On your knees! In five minutes, you can still go to heaven, little Catholic Girl.
Restaurants reek with Lent specials on Friday for those who pretend all week they were good
With his family in tow, he stares at the ass of the young waitress Catholic Girl.
She will bear all your children and bow to you, her purity belongs to you forever
She has no choice but “yes” never “no” to her drunkard husband. Always his Catholic Girl.
The beads of the Rosary bust from wear and worry, trickling across the floor, piercing silence
The bride’s shaky hands expecting thunder and lightning. Until death dear Catholic Girl.
Shuts you off whenever he is away
to pine in a pearlescent box in the dark.
Closes the cover. No arias play.
Leaves nothing but his scent and the marks
on your naked prone torso, the limbs beneath
whose ache recedes more each undisturbed day
though a sea aggregates of dripping grief
beneath that threatens to drown if he delays.
Opens you up one day too late to find
his music box courtesan is a corpse.
Immobile blue body he can no longer wind
to satisfy lust or even remorse.
You start to die when you cease to be hurt.
How gently he places your box in the dirt.
and you’ve been living in some kind of mirage
playing dominoes with the devil
you owe the sonofabitch about three fifty
but you both know neither of you are
good at paying debts, the machinery of night
is the only music you need, the demons are on
now dropping from your shoulder to circle
the room taking bets and hollering
you don’t even think to leave the table
all your angels must be on vacation or worse
have left your side to stay up all night
with better company, who’re you to judge?
You’re on, you’re here now, the fire in your belly
is out but you have lightning in your veins
sinister breeze on your scalp and a cock that could
cut diamonds, but your girl is tired of your shit
too, asleep in the next room, your mama
always told you no good man is awake at 3 am,
so what does that make you? Flipping tiles
chain smoking cigarettes and haunting the house
even ghosts have an ambition to scare, you’re
a shell and the devil will leave you too as the sunbeams
wake the goodhearted from their sleeps
you’ll be walking to that same gas station
to get the same pack of smokes watching the same mothers
send the same kids to school and you will walk back
alone to sleep while the world is awake again
No one wants
highfalutin poetry
anymore
They also don’t
give a damn about
how long you might
have spent on some
navel-gazing bullshit
They want the truth,
not some deep down
in the darkness truth,
but the kind of truth
that fits in the toilet
Not deep but true,
like the no nonsense
of a morning dump,
and what it might
mean — or not
Yes, that kind of truth,
or what you might learn
from a crow gouging out
the eyes of a pigeon
it killed just for fun
That kind of
black raven truth,
or the truth of why
relationships end, and
please don’t bore us
with some deep
psychological
reasoning
No, just say it as it is,
the sex got goddamn
boring, not because
of daddy issues
or mommy hang-ups,
but because it just
gets fucking stale,
or because your partner
reminds you of someone
that you hate
Not the one you married,
not the one you would
have climbed the sky
to steal the moon for,
no, that person isn’t
around anymore
Yeah, that kind of truth,
ugly, stinking truth
is what the asshole
readers want
No, not what they want,
what they demand
We never spoke of love.
Mutual desire masked in animal-skins and scales,
In tooth and fang, bites drew blood and claw-marks,
Scratched the length of the spine.
I was a bar-fly with money and as the clock ticked and tocked,
An increasing appetite.
She was a wasp, not necessarily a White-Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
She belonged only to the insect kingdom. All appetite.
Other lives, different nights, we would have toasted each other
With whisky and cheap beer, maybe even dated, became a couple.
Tonight, we feasted on each other,blood and flesh,
Parasites of one kind or another.
Our union spawned a new predator,our hungers combined.
From the bedroom, a new hunter emerged.
The best and worst of our union.
Our husks could only bear witness to the birth,
With another Happy Hour only a few hours away.
The other night I bought a copy
of her old book of poetry.
I’m not sure why.
I’d been drinking a bit
and thinking about things
that have gone.
I’d long since gotten rid of the photographs
the texts, the underthings.
I guess I bought the book
just so I could have something again.
Like I said, I’d been drinking.
I’m browsing through it now,
hearing her voice.
She’s not as good a writer
as I remembered her to be
and there’s some comfort in that.
But when she was on, she was on
which is more than you can say
for most.
And even the not so good poems
are still uniquely hers, which is
also more than you can say for most.
On the page she’s tough and mean,
all sex and trouble and above all else
a burning desire to live.
Her softness doesn’t come
through much, or her humor.
But she was sometimes soft
and I’ve never known truer laughter.
But all of this was years ago.
I don’t think she writes poetry anymore.
You can’t find her on social media.
Just another ghost in a world
lousy with ghosts.
I guess it’s good that I don’t have to see
who she’s flirting with, her dumbass kids
or who she’s married to.
I thumb through it a while then give the book
it’s rightful place on the shelf, wedged in
between Keats and D.H. Lawrence;
all those tough sexy poems she wrote
for everyone but me.
