Civilization | Timothy A Robbins

A voice muffled by a hand prescribes many treatments.
Take the hand away and much is lost. Like the deer

I lost, one-inch high, living down the hall from parents
who taught me how to lie. I’m pretty sure this figurine

sparked my first awareness of a link between the lovely
and the breakable. In some childish way I wondered

what fool designed spindly faun-legs apt to snap in
kindergarteners’ grips. A fool counting on fond parents

to replace broken toys that kids would cease to love.
(Let us muster the meanings of fond.) Sleepiness is a

muffler of voices whether from the pulpit or from the
brother who shares your room or later from the lover

who invades your mattress, a repository I’ve given much
thought to lately. Every time I turn on the TV I see ads

for pricey high-tech beds and say to myself, “He who
sleeps in heaven laughs these beds to scorn.” I who go

like a deposed Louis XIV from living room sofa to the
loveseat in my room to the floor in the hall fear comfort

will stop my roving. Everyone knows I sleep on the
floor. The retired truck driver who prints my boarding

passes. The god who makes a list of my typos but does
not show it to me. The nurse who takes my temperature

with the tap of a wand and tells me every time he has
a new tattoo on a new internal organ. An ethics professor

who only watches animated porn. The woman who
taught me to sing about roving. My parents, who watch

only shows they’ve recorded so they can fast-forward
through the commercials.I keep an eye on this high

renaissance of ads. CGI makes products gorgeous.Some
are as funny as Twain, some as lachrymose as Dickens,

some as deafening as the Magnificat!

Timothy Robbins teaches ESL. He has a B.A. in French and an M.A. in Applied Linguistics. He has been a regular contributor to Hanging Loose since 1978. His poems have appeared in Three New Poets, Slant, Main Street Rag, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Off The Coast and others. His collection Denny’s Arbor Vitae was published in 2017. He lives with his husband of twenty years in Kenosha, Wisconsin, birthplace of Orson Welles. His collection of poems “Carrying Bodies” is to be published in October 2018 by Main Street Rag Press.