Today, while browsing the web, I learned of the death of M. Christian Robinson, whose sobriquet was "scratch poet"; and although the Pittsburgh Poetry Slam, which evidently he co-founded, noted his death was by suicide, they made little mention of circumstances, and saw fit mostly only to print that he was hated for beating his girlfriend.
Christian was known to me. One of his short poems
Quote:
Not until
I find out whether
Jack Abbott
is guilty or not
appeared in my 1986 chapbook Skate Scam. He made a fuss about the idea that I would steal the copyright and make money. I'd never really thought about mental illness before. He tended to lurk on the street corners looking very dour and I suspected him of being one of the Wilkinsburg folks who gloated when Peter Shell's carrot tape hit their mark, got Fripp incensed and was later used to torture me into seizures. He was the type who would say that I was ratting on Pittsburgh by talking about child molestation crime...or maybe that's not fair, I mean, he never actually said that to me.
I went to Letsche Alternative High School in the Hill District for a long time. I know how angry and isolated Black intellectuals are, young, rowdy, mischievous, given a lot of rope to hang themselves and virtually no meaningful mental health care exists in Pittsburgh. When he appeared on the cover of Pittsburgh Magazine I frankly found the Peter Leo styled gesture warped. It goes far in what I've always hated by The International Poetry Forum and Sam Hazo that nobody intervened with Christian while there was still time. The ACLU in Pittsburgh are so busy defending the rights of the drug addled that they stalk anyone actually trying to get meaningful intervention for ... in this case, a poet in danger to himself and others.
Pitt is an atrocity and Western Psychiatric might as well be razed to the ground.
Christian, like Gary Fuss, ironically, also deceased in a tragedy, were together I understand in a place I never saw myself, it was a runaway joint for kids in high school, called Hell House. Many, many people knew for a long, long time how troubled and struggling M. Christian Robinson. No one ever found a way around his stubborn nature, and I suspect few ever gave it much thought. Learning of his death, I am just reminded that even though I went to Pennsylvania's Governor's School thanks in no small measure to social and academic rehabilitation that I experienced at Letsche, and always identified myself as a poet, I was there for forty years and I didn't pull together my own first booklet until after I moved to Seattle.
Christian they say beat his girlfriend piteously and then somehow took his own life. All of this was in the making for years. He tried and tried to reach out. Something should have been done about it before, from somewhere. I have absolutely no doubt that that vulgar, chronic outsider group of rich, decadent assholes, including many fairies, who haunt Pittsburgh from that whore: Carnegie Mellon University, made it impossible with their constant jests at the idea of society's right to be concerned about violent artists (and you will weary yourselves to no end maliciously lying about what they did to a non-violent artist who was troubled), just as Pittsburgh sees to it that the homeless are driven into despair.
The reason it angers and saddens me so very much isn't just that a life I valued was lost, and it isn't just that a man who hurt me was never stopped from hurting others, it is because Pittsburgh consciously created this sad story. Christian became and did what Peter Leo and all those other creeps downtown insisted he become as they dogged him through high school, and taunted him with celebrity gestures and his fifteen minutes of fame. His absolute terror that I would steal his verse from him upset me then and it upsets me now.
The pricks of Pittsburgh, even those like Jan Beatty who publicly condemned him after he was gone, are really the ones to blame. M. Christian Robinson was a victim of that terrible society.
I don't say that about everyone I ever met there. Maybe it's just that he was so into poetry that it riles me so bitterly to learn of his demise.
Thank you, Christian, not for how you lived, but for how you tried to.
The Interrogator
for M. Christian Robinson
Crying is on the radio
of penury in Pittsburgh.
What does Otis Redding want?
Nobody told me a thing.
Nobody tells me nothing.
Another man ended his stint
took his own life
with the hardware of hints.
Just between you and me,
London and Berlin,
I'm sorry to hear about that.
The Interrogator,
you didn't like him
you prefer a man
with all the answers.
Bad, bad news
about bad, bad news.
You won the fight
I went looking for today.
That surly man
you might only half-believe
how he loved to dance.
He lived on his feet
in every corner of a big town.
In high school
he turned up in class once in a while
with bigger questions than me.
Hip Hop played his game
or he didn't play.
In the pot smoke
he would laugh just like a kid,
haunt remotes
where police trembled
and showed up
in student activities
at the college.
The Interrogator
you didn't like him
you prefer a man
with all the answers.
In a safer world
for ugly truths
with a punching bag
in his garage
and a little money
to buy
some thinking space
he might not
have overdosed
on angry questions.
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