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Poetry Books > My New Book -- Out in October

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Timothy Robbins | 3 comments I have a new collection of poetry, due out in October 2018. The publisher, Main Street Rag Press, is taking advance orders now. And naturally, I'm trying to drum up some business. Here's the link:

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And here's a sample.

A Flash

Caught with his leather pants down, between his image
and his imagery, Morrison flashed the cops and
this is what his fans did see. A sexy young Pharaoh

swaying with bulrushes. A determined young Pharaoh
whose stride parted bulrushes. A bugle that blew every
tune but Taps and made all tunes bear Taps� burden.

A Cubist mule, an expressionist carrot, a Fauve cart.
Relationships not yet hardened. My reason for living
reciting an equation as long as the Great Depression’s

breadlines and headlines pasted end to end. One God
saying,“Let there be flowcharts!� while a thousand
other Gods cried, “Let there be pie graphs!� A woman

without a lantern looking for the last of the Good Popes.
Living voices passing on a dead song that longed
when it was breathing to go crowd-surfing. Chinese

workers� numb fingers and a school of artists who thought
the point was not the microchips but the complex color
on the workers� fingertips. A queer whose T-shirt

insisted he was a homey-sexual. He was a honey-sexual.
Cigarette butts in a planter, selling nicotine to my ficus.
Orphaned panties. Names missing from a guestbook.

A cadre of accidental pilots gracefully crashing a
fleet of accidental jets. A ball of clay able to recognize
desperate ships and to hoist itself up like a sudden

lighthouse. Billy Strayhorn talking on a white phone,
sitting on a white phone, composing on a white phone,
being betrayed by a white phone. Tie Jun, a student

of my middle years. He was sad at our parting and
promised pictures of his anchor baby I knew he’d
never send. The sole surviving line from a teen poem

flying blind as I tried to shout it down, hands cupped
around my cry (origin of praying hands). An MFA
photography student who gave me a choice: either

the sexy pictures she took of my youth or the memory
of her kindness had to fade. The Carter Family
singing Keep on the Sunny Side. Their guitars poorly

tuned. Were they too poor to buy shiny strings?
Could they not hear? Were they tuning with ears so
used to the funeral wailing of voices warped by tears

that sour notes sounded ripe? Caught with their
badges down, the cops flashed Morrison who was
actually Yo Yo Ma pressing his knees to my F holes.


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