Tourist
5 MayShe kissed me at the peak of the guitar riff crescendo
near the tail end of OK Computer.
I couldn’t tell you if I thought it was romantic or not,
my head was still spinning for my college sweetheart–
couldn’t even slow my mind down enough
to just shut up and enjoy the moment.
I’d run off to the next available vixen
and we’d barely had the chance to get to know the other person
we were just staying out all night getting our buzz on
and mugging down as we saw fit.
Yorke singing in my ear to “slow down”
while I was on her couch trying to navigate her tongue with my own.
~Edward Austin Robertson
Travelogues (For my friend Michelle)
20 AprThere was a real bittersweet period of my life
from 2009-2014
where I constantly overthought things
and analyzed them until my brain was exhausted.
I salvaged my sanity through music, painting, writing,
playing basketball, and traveling.
Occasionally I sprinkled in a lady or two,
partly for psychic needs,
partly for hormonal curiosity,
partly for a good story,
and mostly for vanity.
But like most medications,
it was too easy to get addicted to them
and they were better in small doses.
Places were no longer places,
they became memories.
Women were no longer fantasies,
they were opportunities–and eventually became people.
I learned how plunge, binge,
and withdraw—riding those rails across the Rockies,
scribbling emotions into notebooks
and running through possibilities
in my mind.
The smells and sounds of each city
told me everything I needed to hear.
Old diners and dive bars
interested me more than clubs and fancy restaurants.
They called “bohemian,
drifter, gypsy, deadbeat, hipster.”
But I wanted to know things.
I needed to see things.
So I learned to indulge, purge, withdraw, and observe–
while ping-ponging across the map
towards my next lesson.
~Edward Austin Robertson
Captured by the Moment
20 AprIt could have all been a dream
created by a lungful of hashish,
but I couldn’t have imagined
an evening of weirder moments
than the ones I experienced that night.
A Robot Themed Wedding
was the draw.
And after taking a quick perusal around the bar,
I felt compelled me to propose
to my best friend’s girlfriend (with his permission of course)
and the rest is history.
But anytime one can join a Conga line
wearing a Darth Vader Halloween Mask,
dancing to programmed robots playing
“Hot Hot Hot”,
one doesn’t overthink the circumstances.
My only worry at the time was “how could I possibly top this?”
Which pretty much summed up my life up to that point:
Surreal, sublime, and absurd.
~Edward Austin Robertson
The Mystery From Mansfield
20 AprHer long legs and cute pearly whites
somehow escaped my attention
for most of the semester;
but when it was on,
it was on. And boy,
was it on.
The conversation was good.
She was surprisingly down to earth.
She coached volleyball and hoops,
and had yet to realize how attractive she really was.
Beastly and sensuous
all at once,
before I could figure out what was happening
it was over just as randomly
as it had started.
I couldn’t tell you when we stopped hanging out
it was such a blur of a few weeks.
There is even a good chance
that we only hung out a handful of times.
Who knows what happened? So much had changed
between the NBA Playoffs and Duke-Carolina 2006.
But the last time that I saw her,
I knew within the first 5 minutes
she wasn’t going to sleep with me.
Which I wasn’t too broken up about–
back then there were plenty of other ladies,
none of which were Duke fans.
~Edward Austin Robertson
Fork
19 FebIt was clear to me that I’d hit a fork in the road
staring down at this naked rear end facing me
from the downward dog position
on my mattress in my filthy skid row apartment.
I was cognizant of the chance (at least in my mind)
to get back
at her husband and my ex girlfriend.
but my pettiness and spite
were not strong enough to mask
the odor repeatedly hitting my olfactory glands.
There’d be no washing this away
and there was no telling
what new lows awaited me
if I went through with it.
This was one of those moments of truth
where I would forever be defined
by my ensuing actions.
There would be no going back
if I decided to plunge
even further into the muddy ditch
that was becoming my life.
~Edward Austin Robertson
Nuclear Polio Vaccination 