Yet tarry awhile. Set a spell,
Big Bad Leroy Iffucan.
It takes three miracles to make a saint,
just one mistake to make a man.
Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson you gave us all and now you’re nothing.
Michael Jackson one zillion dollars June 25, 2009.
I don’t care if you lightened your skin.
I don’t care if a pig in a poke
get out of a poke
and can’t get back in.
For a while here an unusual man?
I’ll say. The grave is gone and gray
as Gary. Mills shoulder dirty snow.
Let my people go.
Michael’s mind out-Heroded stuff.
He lay with many a kid. I don’t know
and you shouldn’t act
like you know what he did.
And if they say why, why,
tell ’em that it’s human nature.
Some men is an island.
The lighted sidewalk squares fall silent.
Political Poem for Michael Robbins to Sing
I am my twin brother Matthew Robbins.
I know how to light up a room.
I kill one bird with several stones.
Israeli jets light up Khartoum.
A savage servility slides
by on the way we are feeling
from Kabbalah to Kabul,
Daodejing to Darjeeling,
Shiite to Shinola,
Ob-La-Di to objet (a),
Ram a Lam to Ding Dong,
Obi-Wan to Ob-La-Da,
from Hopi to IHOP
and Mayan to Ramayana,
Robespierre to RoboCop,
yippee-ki-yay to kumbayah.
A savage serves me a slider.
Grease is the word for his face.
Michael Robbins, cute as a button.
My alibi, my donkey, my master race!
Twentieth Century Fox
Turns out I never made a lampshade
from, Jew or gentile, human skin.
I mean the Nazis didn’t. Sometimes
I feel so evil, I get us confused.
Colonel Klink on his way to masseuse.
God is a spider, the moon’s made of barf.
Wait—how did I get so smart?
Reading Foxe’s Martyrs, its famous quote:
“Be of good comfort, Naomi Wolf.”
Covering the election from the Persian Gulf,
it’s Harold Bloom. I am the canon, hear me roar.
In the name of Bush v. Gore,
I plant my fat on the land.
I am woman. You wouldn’t understand.
To the Drone Vaguely Realizing Eastward
This is a poem for President Drone.
It was written by a camel.
Can I borrow your phone?
This is for President Mark Hamill.
Newtown sounds a red alert.
Mark Hamill asks if Ernie’s burnt.
Every camel’s a first-person shooter.
The Prez’s fez is haute couture.
It seems strange that he should be offended.
The same orders are given by him.
Paging Pakistan and Yemen.
Calling all the drone-dead children.
The camel can’t come to the phone.
This is for the drone-in-chief.
Mumbai used to be Bombay.
The bomb bay opens with a queef.
Sweet Virginia
I got a letter from the government.
It said let there be night.
I went through your trash.
There was night, all right.
I consider how your light is spent.
I have butterflies a little bit.
I have some pills I take for it.
I’ve been up since four the day before.
Agony’s a cinch to sham.
Don’t worry about the environment.
Let it kill us if it can.
I give a tiny tinker’s damn.
I put the ox behind the cart.
Consume away my snowblind heart.
Fastened to a service animal
it is waiting for the beep.
It is waiting for the right to change.
Hello, I know you’re there, pick up.
Sticky Fingers
I practice Velcro mind,
tar baby mind. I stick
to my guns. I’m a major find.
Stick to my loo, my darling.
Stick to your own kind.
Stately, plump Wayne Manor!
Mattel, Adele, Adorno—
O DeLorean
on extended wings!
I know a guy who knows a guy.
The octopus of glam rock
shoplifting Tide. Ed Dorn,
Isadora Duncan, defend us!
Yes, Virginia, there is a.
Captain Kitty Pryde
of the Exxon Valdez,
sorry I missed your call. The wall
I pass through passes through
me and out the other side.
Big Country
Fiddle no further, Führer. Rome is built.
It took all day. Now let us so
love the world. I’m just thinking out loud.
My stigmata bring out my eyes.
The smallpox uses every part of the blanket,
and the forest is a lady’s purse.
The Indian is a pink Chihuahua peeking
his head from the designer zipper.
Out here it’s mostly light from the fifteenth
century slamming into the planet.
I can’t see the forest for the burn unit.
All the planet does is bitch bitch bitch.
I know it’s last minute but could you put
out my eyes? At the subatomic level,
helmeted gods help themselves to gold.
Up here? The body’s an isolation ward.
Out Here in the Fields
Out here in the fields
a technician dims the light.
Too soon to say for sure
if this coheres all right.
You ask what time the elephant
sat upon the fence.
Sounds to me like time to get
a few new elephants.
I dress up like a razor blade
and hide inside an orange.
Petition, little children, one
who finds you less annoying.
No orange can be compelled
to self-incriminate.
The jury will disregard
the thirty-seventh state.
Longshoremen and long shores,
short piers and ships in port.
Third planet from the sun, I’m told.
It won’t stand up in court.
You got moxie, kid, mixing
ricin in the suburbs.
I’m gonna be a nicer person
and emulate the lovebirds
with night-lights in their hips
and UC Davis eyes.
We’ll sing the Mary Hartman theme
until the great assize.
Anna Wintour’s discontented.
I’m bathing in the nude.
I’m erring on the side.
I’m pretty sure we’re screwed.
This is rocket science
in the Desert Father style.
Those weirdos in their caves—
man, you should read their file.
They made war upon their privates.
<
br /> They had insects in their beards.
Once you got ’em talking,
they’d prattle on for years.
And I’d be more like them
if I were less like this,
a billion points of glitter
in a fathomless abyss.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND NOTES
Some of these ditties first appeared in Commonweal, The Economy, The Hat, Hazlitt, Lemon Hound, Los Angeles Review of Books, Mississippi Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, Prelude, and The Walrus. One love to the editors.
Overnight shipping thanks: Paul Slovak, Anthony Madrid, Steven Critelli.
Priority shipping thanks: Paige Ackerson-Kiely, Robert Archambeau, Zach Baron, Paul-Jon Benson, Mark Z. Danielewski (RIP Carl), Mark Fletcher, Virginia Heffernan, Ilya Kaminsky, Anahid Nersessian, Christa Robbins, Rose Schapiro, Dana Snitzky, Amber Tamblyn, Jen Vafidis.
“To the Drone Vaguely Realizing Eastward”: See my essay “A Poem for President Drone” in Los Angeles Review of Books at http://lareviewof books.org/essay/a-poem-for-president-drone.
Photo: Clayton Hauck
Michael Robbins was born in Kansas during the Nixon administration. Sometime later, he received his PhD in English from the University of Chicago. His poetry and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Harper’s, and many other publications. He lives in America with the best cat in the world.
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