Two Poems by Denis Robillard

The Pacific Trash Vortex


There’s an 18 minute video about a shopping bag

on a Ulysses quest of self.

I’ve seen it a few times now.

A grocery variety bag, now an internet star

questing a field at knee angle

then wind launched

it lobes along a stubble track

and a deserted road

like a paper kite searching its maker

in its simple American Beauty.

It prates anonymously a moment among horses

wraps itself onto a statue

but after a brief struggle manages to flee

like a circle circus it grizzles and

grouses

on the immortality of plastic

via Herzog as Omniscient narrator.

　

How many stunt bags were used

Warner, for this pop star bag

to navigate the wind a dozen times?

What are its Signs of Life

as the white Wastec Truck delivers it to the

Wasteland of plastic junk,

only to be later pushed

into the pacific trash vortex

and eaten by monsters hiding

in a scatter field of Teutonic debris?

In 6 years this little traveling baggy

will turn and churn into a pelagic soup

wind driven currents sucking it

into horse latitudes

where the whale music is already trapped

forever.

 



BEAR DREAMS



Sometimes late at night

Half asleep

Half awake

A black underworld does its biding

Drawing me into a

slow slow drift from bed’s thick forest

I am soaked in sweat

By this evening of fur sighs

Growled visions from

shape shifting anxiety

Memory is encoded

in bear spit there

The slather of probe tongue

Leaving acid markers as totem

It wasn’t the mystic dancer

on the Delhi Road

But we used to see them

hustle across the tar bled road

In late August

Large Skulking spirits

shaking the shadow roads alive

With X ray drama glistening nostrils

In dark geography

These blind sniffs,

Twilight grunts and growl hungers

Rip through Obfuscated darkness

And reach Behind trailer thin walls

where I sleep this nightmare again.

 




Denis Robillard was born in Northern Ontario and now teaches high school in Windsor, CANADA. For the past 15 years several of his poems have appeared 90 times in the small presses and on line magazines across Canada, The USA, England and Scotland. Some of those include: Rattle, Rampike, Word Riot, Nashwaak Review, Algoma Ink, Cliff Soundings (Michigan), Sidereality, Orange Room Review, Dogzplot Magazine, Dusty Owl, Dufus and many more. In 2011 Robillard was published in Windsor Review, Bolts of Silk and Ottawa Arts Review. He is an avid photographer and traveler. You may see his article work on occasion in the pages of Hey Philippines Magazine.