rob plath's there's a little hobo in my heart... by David McLean (Chapbok Review)

rob plath's there's a little hobo in my heart who forever gives the finger to humanity

Chapbook Review
by David McLean

This new product on the consumer market is one of many by Mr Plath, and it's one of his best. I love the thought of the demons in his head scrawling their anti-life slogans on his skull and making him write poems. And though Rob presents a world view that is pretty negative there is positivity here, he dreams in his nasty apartment, he sees more beauty in his world than other “aesthetes” see in their fucking sunsets and mother-loving glimpses into dead granny's eye.

Awareness of death and the feel of the weight of the sweaty balled feet pressing down on the stolid concrete, knowledge of how unspeakable our insides are, the stupid bones and the flesh around them just waiting to decay, that's what gives Plath the power to write words that are not a complacent mantra that basically reinforces the capitalist heterosexist status quo. And there is a certain moral superiority in this way of looking at things, no illusions, “my brain is an uncleaned latrine.” His poetry “knots nooses out of rainbows and hangs unicorns.”

Ultimately, the impetus behind the verse is existential. I mean, life is shit, the human condition sucks, we die and that's forever, everybody wants to survive death and nobody will. Rob is smart enough to see that one can take a certain satisfaction in phlegmatically coughing up a nice lump of phlegm. It's better than nothing. Not a lot, but it is.

There should be more corpses in poems, or at least nasty little hobos who know that their future is as a corpse. And nothing more. Angels are just there for the raping, for the devils' entertainment. Nice one Rob. It's on sale at Dead Beat Press. Do buy it.

Author bio:

David McLean is Welsh but has lived in Sweden since 1987. He has a BA in History from Balliol (1982) and an MA in philosophy from Stockholm (1999). He has one chapbook as a free download at Why Vandalism. Another, in print, can be ordered at Erbacce Press. A full length poetry collection Cadaver's dance is available at Whistling Shade Press and can be ordered at alibris or amazon. Another book of 128 pages is out with Erbacce-press, "pushing lemmings." More books are in the pipeline and there is even a self-published book of poems at Lulu called "eating your night" Lulu. Details of around 600 poems in or forthcoming in over 260 zines online or print over the last eighteen months are at Mourning Abortion.