Doren Robbins: California Poets Part 9, Five Poems

Doren Robbins

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Doren Robbins

Five Poems

11 Chomsky on C-SPAN

It was an allegory. The imploded moods. The Greek shaman Tiresias’

trained birds went mad 450 B.C. We come to conclusions. I don’t,

you might, she wouldn’t, I’ve tried, who can tell, I don’t trust who

will, or who should. Either circumstance. They launch their own

humidities. Barometers are not the issue. You could die stoned in

your car or involuntarily fail to. What made what led to that. The

sane person idealizes tenderness as remedial surgery. Anyone’s

disgust looking at the system. Thay call putting your life on the

butchering line processing table, “a tour.” The contrivable fabricates

well in The Empire. You can wish them plugged bowels, Parabowels,

no sauce in their apples, dog stones in their bubbling bath. Ever the

accomplishment. Innocuously lived with. Not always against our will.

Their will. We underrate consequence. We excel at it. No, we

disregard consequence. I dream in vascular bundles. There’s an

inconsistency in the report. I wasn’t on the graveyard shift answering

phones for EMT. I drove, destined to delivery work in Studio City.

The valley of addresses. Later. Colorado Avenue to the Writing Lab,

to Lincoln Boulevard, flying on a Triple Turkish, sometimes with

whiskey, to work with Alberto “The Lone Night Owl” Flores, Ivan

Petraglyhpos and Princess Cleveland for assistance organizing their

sentences, a group report on the Brazilian Rain Forest loss of birds,

disappeared moss, fungi, tribe evacuation, no longer biological

anthropological Rain Forest resemblances in the biological Rain

Forest recorded ecological record. Tolerated evaporated volition.

Came out of someone’s depression without someone handling the

depression drug part of the confrontation. The seed myth dream.

Two mastodon tusks. Flat. Ribbon shaped. He didn’t know what

they were. They’re nineteenth century corset hoops. Why the

Pleistocene detail? Ended up on something like an eggplant. He

wasn’t uncomfortable to the point of changing things. He adjusted

his pants. It was eggplant. Or grapefruit. Something he arrived on top

of. A blurred-out post-it stuck to his knee. The reliverance (I know

how it’s spelled). People uninterested to explain what you find

incoherent wait at the counter. Wherever he was a cashier. Wherever

he was a student. Law of the land, lord of the worms. Maybe no one

beat him. No one beat him literally. That’s what was going on.

Document recovered from “Rewind after you.” The fact he was not

closer to Millie and he didn’t dream about Mindy. What if it isn’t

about that? Why all this concluding that long this way? There’s

no obligation. It’s about deserves. Lack of tenacity. Tenacity of

restriction. Disruption’s continuity. It’s right there in the gorilla

print. There were hieroglyphics of snails, mostly in mating positions,

one appeared to be expiring. Hall’s Balls!––they ate the dung of

woodpeckers! Some reluctant. Some uncontrolled. Wait, we’re

getting C-SPAN again. We were waiting to hear Noam Chomsky on

C-SPAN. We will probably hear it forever. Started right in, “Capital

(money). Deregulation, the upper 1% population, their entire half of

the stock market, which is capital (money), theirs, whoever’s left,

10% stash and exhaust the rest. Our fairy-tale economy.” The

annulment metaphor. Media One Cable programming. No fairytales.

No slap fights for them. Time allotted: four minutes max. Two weeks

before the AT&T- Media One buy out began. Don’t be silly, Clinton

was in power, Goldwater was in power, Bureau of Land Management

was in power. The Emergency Broadcasting Alert System, “it’s a

test.” They’re “testing equipment.” Westinghouse Electric was in

Power. “Viewers will be informed. There might be an emergency.”

Equipment, it’s about the equipment. “It may be necessary...

programming might be interrupted. Several times. It’s a test.

Extended periods…” It’s only a possibility. Corporate etiquette. The

customer. The “inconvenience” apology etiquette. It may be

necessary. Their apologization. Chomsky never returned. Don’t

bother. Chomsky was having a diet coke. Chomsky kept talking to a

map on the guest room wall. The four-minute duration expired.

Media One confirmed: Chomsky had to go to North Korea. Duct

taped TV voice. Emergency Broadcasting arrest-i-file. Don’t be

crazy. Chomsky kept interpreting the subversive New York Times

Opinion Page quotations manufacturing resent. The naturalism of

nationalism. The print in his mind was too small. He needed a break,

he needed his magnifying glass, there was only a fountain telescope,

he’ll be right back. Chomsky’s numbers’ game research exposé.

Media One de-programmed 60 of 89% of us. One last “apology for

the in-convenience.” The anorexic formality. The customer. The

customer. Chomsky is a Cuban name. He ran out of the studio to

smoke a Cuban cigar. His cell phone was made by subaltern ACLU

anarchist engineers. His cigar could’ve been laced with something. It

was his grand daughter’s wedding. She married an Iranian weapons

designer. The Chomsky’s are sociopaths. Taped live in Washington.

27

Minister Carpet was Virgil Carpet. The way he swung a hammer

we called him The Chopper. Said to call him Virgil. Insisted you call

him that. Not the soft “g” “Virg.” Not “Gil” with the always hard

one. But Virgil. The name itself incredulous to our style of names.

Even Vergible Woods changed his name to “Teacake.” There’s

a name. 

Long fingers portrait

We called him The Frog. We called him The Brute. Wore those black

stubbed work boots. Looked short, leather coverings for human

hoofs. Said he might as well be loading boxes again for Bill Hurnis

and his German-Pinscher son. For this kind of money, might as well

be sweating it out at The Imperial Club playing five-and-ten-dollar

Lowball Blind.

We called him Pug or The Mutt. Dayshift ended he hummed along

in his head to Mr. Farfel’s “Mica, Mica, Parva Stella,” “Twinkle,

Twinkle, Little Star.” He played it on the inward whistle. It was

Mr. Farfel’s accordion with lyrics version he played back in his head,

stuck on the intervocal, on the “c” in mica, on the “k” in twinkle.

His remedial hang-up. One of them. In his camper after a nine-hour

shift at Dint Construction and Maintenance, his head and arms

moved erratically, the tape turned up all the way, smoking what he

smoked. That guy was in a caffeine gasoline World Cup listening aura

to express what it must be like.

Laid off he used to walk past two in the morning. People told him it’s

not a smart time to be out. He said anyone seeing him walking after

two in the morning looked at him like he was more insane. There’s

no belonging. You stay vigilant. Isolation. The other kinds of

vigilance failed. Good Fortune has its own Salt Pit. Stuck from what

happened, what didn’t happen, what never penetrated. Lacked the

capacity to originate or operate. Maybe in advance. Everything’s the

culprit. Habituated to the culprit. You can friction arousal. You reach

a mechanism––you reach a mechanism. What happened? Nothing needs

to happen. Incidental harmonies. Erratics. Virgil Carpet. Mostly

raveled fragments carried him. Resemblances. There was Menace.

Not always perceivable. Menace ridicules perception. What details.

They weren’t just standing around storing it up on the side waiting

for the big moment. They weren’t just squeezing their whistles

calculating the payoff dateline. They arrived with enormous flags.  

They had more than the tying a dog to a tree in the yard and never

returning syndrome. They expressed their grievances in business suits

and white sheets. They came for abandoned foreclosures. They came

for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. They already spent The

Treasure of the Sierra Madre. What are they the Devil? Who cuts

their checks? They have their own Koran Analects Sutras Ten

Commandments. A single Chivalrous code. Their own manner “of

disordering of all the senses.” Doctors of Unreason. Not for their

likes. They too experience Maslow’s theory of self-esteem and self-

actualization. Wild beasts with principles half-Armenian Isaac Babel

called them. They descended from the Great Gnat Clan. There’s no

scientific consensus on what constitutes a gnat. They’re described

flying in large numbers themselves described as clouds.­­ What is the

total count in the phrase “flying in large numbers” or “rampaging

hordes”? What is the total count for Otto Schubert’s ink drawing

“The Suffering of Horses in the War 1919”? What happened at the

front of the customer service line, referred to in an interview, what

stared down the title of Teddy Plentikoff’s painting, “At the Counter

with Amputations 2003 to 2023”?

12

Under the central stairway skylight Cora drew a face on the wall.

Thick blue eye shadow she thought made her look older. For Mitchel

the photographer. His Wavecrest apartment. Venice. One room

kitchen bedroom front room closet. She worked in a “wiring jungle”

crimping wires, twisting wires for appliances and components. All

women. Smaller faster hands. Stayed ten hours for less than eight

hours the pay. Mitchel ran a bath for the nervous lovers. Tim Hardin

sang out of the stereo the way a hummingbird feeds. The way a

hummingbird worries. She remembered the voice hid truculence. She

put a root belonged to her into him. Mitchel. He displaced it quick

enough. Whatever he was lucid about, it was more luck than

discipline. Two scrambled in that loss. Long streets. Every night they

walked. The lost part they couldn’t map out. Unpopulated lands

dominated their map. His mouth and her chin. The abstract pleasure.

How pleased he was he attracted you was the expression in his

eyes. What she meant. Moist and steady. Not in the figurative

insanguination sense. Some other sanguine. Not yet known to them.

But the swerving feeling. Picked up from the rug and saved in a

drawer his imitation leather Bolo tie. She didn’t call after two months.

Someone in a dream, no longer here, memory won’t terminate. Flies

flies flies.

17

She did then she stopped. In four months he wrote 113 letters to her.

He had a file. She didn’t answer the last 112. He put a Haiku in every

letter. All of them bad. Some with twelve, some with twenty-three

lines. A few with seven or eight syllables. It was during this period he

completed “The Poodle Sonnets.” What a fantasist he became. What

fuel. Now someone’s talking, someone known for his day and a half

of blunted clarity. Maybe every two months. Of all the wasted

erections. What a Creature from the Black Lagoon that side of him

lived inside of. He got used to that Lagoon. He added up the accurate

complaints. The authority’s word on it. Him in there defying in bulk

what brought this to happen. A condition with prolonged

digressions. His mouth felt uneven. The current version. He was

completely sand inside. Unripe sand. Where all the preferences are

made. Mindy V brought him cola, brown sourdough slices, Spanish

and Greek cheese. They were on the homecoming train. They were

on the ground that inseminates itself. Her earrings were pewter rams.

She said, When you sleep my rams will lick your neck.

            22

What am I, a human mockingbird, no mock left? You get to the

point there’s no recourse altering what you don’t want to happen,

happening. It adds up. Pledged the wrong allegiance. Tell him that.

He filled-up on the ginger green onion baby corn oyster sauce over

the rice, the prawns, the little cock-like nipple-like Chinese

mushrooms, whether he’d have room for the he couldn’t believe it

miso garlic agave semi-sweet-basil cashew red chili pickled lime part

or not. He had his reasons. The year Lennon the Peace Activist was

shot four times through the back, through the lungs, through the

Norwegian Wood of his shoulder blades, by Chapman-Schmuckman

the Born Again-ist American-ist Murderer Inmate, I came through

the insomnia reading Hart Crane up to the line, “the bottom of the

sea is cruel.” It was a kind of turning point in the human personality,

to understand complexities of human personality, reduce the stability

of human personality to a form of ruined idealizations in the

personality, and down you go. I don’t disagree. He didn’t always have

the problem. It’s the schism prevalent feeling. I was there two years.

That naturalism. Against ourselves. Underestimation. The dissident

talker’s gripe-a-tite.

It’s an ode to vigilance to show up this long. What if it’s distorted

vigilance. Maybe it’s not an ode. The whole robust-athon is what

I mean. The inclusive negate-athon. It’s a swarm of bees. Their

rhythms. Including the dwarf bee, the beekeeper’s bi-polarism, down

to the latent rhythm, the mental stinger, your interior cop, the subnet

mask, the clown’s hat, no circus, secretion following secretion, the

derision of parts, derisory and derisoritis, down to the cigar squat, the

lament, all poli-spam, every unserviceable desire. From Passover

sardines to The Year of the Monkey. When wasn’t it The Year of the

Monkey? Or The Butcher? Adjunct to Ass-lick. All-Time Part-Time

all the Time Incorporated. Work you down to the shitometer. Do

you think they won’t get to that? That that hasn’t it got to that? We

Big Brother ourselves. There’s still a lot of movement with one good

wing. Even if that dewinging the life out of you system isn’t over.

The feeling’s mutual. The dog on the neighbor’s roof reminded him. 

Of what, no one else needs to know. He didn’t mean Aesop and

his talking animals’ morality. He missed those days. Minutes

metabolizing. Reckoning. Shuffling back together. There was…I’m

coming to…it ended up…I’m interrupted. I’m all excuses.

Author Bio:

Originally from Los Angeles, Doren Robbins is a writer and an artist living in Santa Cruz. His writings have appeared in Kayak, The American Poetry Review, Electric Rexroth, The Journal of Experimental Fiction, Lana Turner, Sulfur, Poetry International, Miramar, and Third Rail Journal of the Arts. Selections of his art have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Caliban, Cholla Needles, Empty Mirror, The Houston Literary Review, Otoliths, Paterson Museum of Art (writers that are artists exhibition), Pensive, SULΦUR surrealist jungle, Red Wheelbarrow, Third Rail Journal of the Arts, Utriculi, and in The Ontological Museum New Acquisitions Catalog, and others. In 2025 Sandy Press published his book Itinerant Dreamer, a collage of genres (84 art works with related poems and essays). https://www.sandy-press.com/

Past collections of his poetry, Driving Face Down and My Piece of the Puzzle were awarded the Blue Lynx Poetry Award 2001 and the 2008 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Poetry Award, respectively. His book Twin Extra: A Poem in Three Parts from Wild Ocean Press was nominated for the 2015 Jewish National Book Council Award in Poetry. Sympathetic Manifesto, Selected Poems 1975-2015 now out of print, was published in 2021 (Spuyten Duyvil Press).

As a poet and an artist Robbins organized readings and produced posters to benefit The Romero Relief Fund and The Salvadoran Medical Relief Fund during the Salvadoran Civil War; and for poetsagainst-thewar.com at the beginning of the American-Iraq-Afghanistan Wars. His writing has been awarded fellowships and grants from Oregon Literary Arts, The Loft Foundation, The Chester H. Jones Foundation, The Judah Magnes Museum. Robbins taught creative writing part-time at UCLA Extension, and composition, critical thinking, and ethnic literature part-time at East Los Angeles College, Santa Monica College, and CSU South Gate, before taking a tenured position in creative writing and literature at Foothill College 2001-2022. He was Director or Advisor for the Foothill College Writers’ Conference 2001-2009. Professor Emeritus 2017-2022.