Down This Crooked Road (Anthology)

Edited by: RD Armstrong & William Taylor, Jr.

Poets: Miles J. Bell, Christopher Robin, MK Chavez, William Taylor Jr., Father Luke, Christopher Cunningham and Hosho McCreesh

Lummox Press (PO Box 5301 San Pedro, CA 90733-5301) www.lummoxpress.com

Pages: 156
ISBN: 978-1-929878-03-1

USA Price: $15 + $3 Shipping (USA)
WORLD Price: $15 + $10 Shipping (World)
Publishing Date: September 2009

While he may be better known as the publisher of Zen Baby (the Maximum Rock & Roll of the indie press) Chris Robin is a great minimalist storyteller in his own right, whose poems serve as a mirror to those types of critics, asking them in turn, “just who the fuck do you think you are?”

A drunk who thought I wasn’t homeless enough
heckled me in the middle of my set
He’d read the interview
he wanted blood…
I haven’t carried a bedroll in years
He claimed Bukowski lost his talent
when he got off the park bench
so I yelled into the Mic:
“What do you want me to do, vomit?
You want me to die?
I live in a low-income housing project
I’m quite comfortable
I hope to get out someday
if I get well’
rattled and nervous
I read Wide Open Fool,
the angriest I have ever read it
said “Buy my shit,” and sat down
It felt like a bomb
I wasn’t getting the laughs I’m used to,
They didn’t want my levity

- From “Heckled in Las Vegas (The Idiot Prevails)

Robin channels a lot of his friend William Taylor Jr., but with a kind of Denis Johnson (think Jesus Son era D.J.) runaway street kid ethos worked into the plain spoken lines. In particular, he captures the wide prism that is the Tenderknob (Anti 3 a.m. Poem, Fool at The Old Hotel.) Distinguishing his work from Taylor’s however, is a lot less Romance (of the tragic, doomed variety) and a great deal more morbidity shot through with downright hilarious barbs:

Nicole hands me a stack of her school papers to grade
as if I have nothing to do
I notice the kids are cynical or completely lacking in imagination
Do they copy this stuff off the internet? I ask
She nods and heads upstairs
After ten hours of staring into space and obsessing about why the
cast of Full House
were never massacred in a hail of gunfire
she returns at 6 am
asking eagerly “did anything HAPPEN?” uh no, I tell her
unless you include me wondering if I let that crazy looking guy in
after visiting hours
would he talk to me?
But I don’t tell the last part

- From “Anti 3 a.m. Poem”(w/apologies to WTJ)

The poems here are also a reflection of the larger purpose of Zen Baby, which is not so much to glorify the small, indie press or its participants, but to serve as a way to connect misfits and outsiders to one another, to find the potential in continuing to fly one’s freak flag so to speak, without having to sell out or give in to Dr. Phil and his all to ready acolytes.

Make no mistake, there is a LOT of death, violence and madness to be found in the pages of Angelflies (Coward, Love’s Dead Road, and Who We Kill being good examples) but these serve to create a fertile base for rebuilding redemption within one’s own life, and in doing so, Christopher Robin, with much savvy, displays one of the real purposes of literature outside the commodities market.

“She carries a small bird between her breasts
The news told her that an asteroid would hit the earth
in exactly 22 years
She doesn’t plan to be alive that long

One day it is culture and marriage she craves-
safety
Another day it’s abortion
going to Police Academy
or dancing with the Reggae boys
in a nice house in the suburbs

When she asked me to critique her story,
I did-
When I saw her at the reading, she said:
I won a car with that story-
I didn’t know what to say-
Stupid white boy-
We made her the bouncer
of the Open Mic

Tells me childhood stories of hitch hiking
up and down Highway 9
All of them riding in separate cars-
She had a big family
Over to the church of “stupid white men” for food

Every year her father stole the neighbor’s Xmas tree…
Once she told me not to steal her stories-
they were hers and only hers
but I’m a stupid white boy
and I have no history
All we have is Border’s
And Starbucks-
Are any of our buildings over 100 years old?
Most of us don’t know how to dance at Reggae parties
And you know Bea, all white men are thieves”

- “Thief”

ANGELFLIES IN MY IDIOTSOUP
By Christopher Robin
Platonic 3 Way Press, 2007,27 pages
www.platonic3waypress.com