MIRROR IMAGE
the face may taunt
but it’s my own
it may look at me
with undisguised disgust
but it has no doubt
as to the object
of this revulsion
it examines this
catalog of features
both aggravating
and despairing
runs them through
a reflecting program
of past failure
current dismal situation
and future limited prospects
and responds
with something called
a mirror image
aaaah...
wherever there’s a likeness
can a hate-ness be far behind
- John Grey
(featured in the poetry forum 02.19.12)
editor's note: Is what we see always a construct of how we feel? Maybe the best we can achieve after likeness is indifferent-ness. - mh
THE REAL THING
How come you’re so ominous and large?
What made you grow so suddenly?
And why are the voices, your voice,
most of the touch
where you plant your hands?
What made you dusk and sunrise,
everything in the mirror almost,
over half the footsteps and
the movement in this house?
Where did your threat come from,
the very harshness of your thunder?
Why am I dressed your way,
groomed your way?
Why do I feel like
the small farm
encircled by the huge dam?
You can burst at will
to drown me.
Yes, love sounds so sophisticated
when sugaring the tongue.
But what made you all tongue?
What left me all sugar?
- John Grey
(featured in the poetry forum 07.09.11)
YACHTS IN THE HARBOR
They slip about so gracefully
but I imagine them in heavier seas,
their hulls battered,
sails tortured,
wealthy owners scurrying about
like ants in a stomped-on hill.
They flaunt their masts at me
like they own the weather,
the stillness of this protected cove
but I’m already grooming them
for a hideous sinking,
a pitiless green water devouring.
A pretty woman in a red bikini
waves to me
and I wave back from the shore.
She smiles, a thankful smile,
like she already knows
she’ll be the only survivor.
- John Grey
(featured in the poetry forum 01.18.11)
HONEYMOON HOTEL
Look
in the squalid mirror
while, a wall away,
axmen kill the very wood
from under you.
Your eyes
well with tears,
your reflection with dust,
and "timber!" shouts
the infernal droning echo.
What's that...
a skull with lips
sculpting your despair
with holes enough
for worms to slide through
while, in the bedroom,
forces greater than
the scratching of a fingernail
make the world safe
for your religion once again.
- John Grey
(added 07.21.10)
DOWNTOWN
Downtown, three a.m., the great grotesques are slipping
through the steam from metal grids, like myths, like bigfoot
on the stumbling run, snapped in the distance, too far
to tell if it is real or just some loser dressed up in his finest drugs.
High above, fourth floor apartment, mirror hails the crack-cloaked
dream of rising rock star, his addictions straight from his wall-poster gods,
nose cleared for takeoff by his triumphant pose, air guitar and spoon.
Back alley, manna from the syringe, junkie strait-jackets his
upper arm, presses needle deep into a hungry vein,
while wino takes his orders from a bottle in brown paper,
one gulp to quell the fire, two to start it up again,
the third to transport him back to distant fires
and a favorite splash in a deep black pool
where the fish come with three heads, two tails,
and the water’s blessed with fetal drowning.
- John Grey
(featured in the poetry forum 07.21.10)
STATE OF THE STATE
I’ve got more fingers
than there’s farms,
more toes than there are
wooded hills.
Long gone are
the yellow forsythia,
the cottonwood trees,
the picnic benches.
Many are the
reasons there’s
only new graveyards
not old ones:
money, bulldozers,
politicians, and what
the hell do with all
this garbage.
And, sure
there’s still a pond or two,
brown as the muck
they dump in them.
They chopped down the forest
to put up a Mental Hospital.
After all,
why stop at one lobotomy
- John Grey
(featured in the poetry forum 03.12.10)
LISTENING TO THE BLUES
Hot summer’s afternoon,
alone in the house,
windows closed,
stereo up loud,
music booming through
the speakers,
everyone is black
but me.
- John Grey
(added 01.27.10)
IN ALASKA, NORTH OF FAIRBANKS
I can’t believe how brief
the day is,
how unlike any day
I’ve ever known.
It’s not a day at all really,
just a skein of light
between two nights,
the brief shock
of sunrise stumbling
across a sunset,
like a man catching a glimpse
of his own double,
then it all going black.
And cold...
I’ve never known a heart
as cold as this.
It’s not selective.
It’s out to chill the blood
of everyone.
Hard life breeds hard men,
so the wisdom has it.
But maybe hard men
just show up some place
and this is the result.
- John Grey
(featured in the poetry forum 01.27.10)
TRAVELLING DAYS
I was travelling then
& it seemed as if
every college girl
was on the road
that summer as well
& first my Australian accent
would attract their interest
& then maybe the length
of my hair or the guitar
I always carried on board the bus
& stashed in the overhead rack
or it could have been
the fact that I didn’t do any drugs
or even drink
though they did & they’d smoke pot
in a motel room while I watched
and inhaled anyhow
& I’d kiss them a lot
more than they were used to
& I’d quote poetry
though only Swinburne
whose lines I’d made a point of remembering
& we’d eat in the motel cafe
& we’d buy the local newspaper
& laugh at how insular the articles were
as if the world began and ended
at the big shoe factory
we passed on the way in
& we’d talk politics like two ingenues
who didn’t understand a word of it
& we’d walk to the local park
& be the only ones
sitting on the benches
& holding hands like we were lovers
since school days
though we’d only just met the night before
in the bar with that big woman singing
all those Patsy Cline songs
& I tried like hell not to think
of what would happen when
itineraries finally got in the way
of relationships & we’d have to part
& many a bus station was watered
with my tears when I discovered
saying goodbye wasn’t as easy
as it looked even though I knew
there’d be the next one & the next one
& the next saying okay you’re next for me
- John Grey
(added 09.06.09)
NIGHT OF THE FUNERAL
Your cocoa
has taken on
the hue of nail clippings.
Your shoe
can’t stir
the floor.
And tongues
just bluff
what they are touching.
Likewise,
lips are merely
grief kept busy.
Try to be yourself,
I dare you,
not when you mimic
sad souls taking poison
or, slumped in chair,
ape fallen idols
with the windows closed
and gas turned on.
And yet
your body’s fixed
by your survival.
First bone,
then flesh,
then the mind too.
- John Grey
(featured in the poetry forum 09.06.09)
CAR-HORN
for the cold, and for the frozen strikers, breath
stacked on breath like yesterday’s placards; car-horn
stabs the nearest gruff and angry voice like it’s
a heart;
say depth of winter but mean shallow. I want
to hear the stories told on crankier and crankier
bones of loftier and loftier aims but
the conversation sinks to sex snicker,
tits and ass like more money
in the pocket;
I want to hear the stories of causes stripped to bare
knuckle like color in the dank woods. I want to see
men stopping the company truck with their extended
palm. The virtue of death is solidarity,
is redemption. Jeer the scabs falling
from the semi wheel of the jaundiced winter
sun;
rise up on the sinking mercury; say depth of
feeling but mean hardness of the veins,
ideas breaking up like beads of sweat, rolling
off brows before they can ice over
- John Grey
(added 09.06.09)
JOHN WAYNE
I loved John Wayne
long before I ever
felt that way
about someone female.
Before the melting heart,
there was the trigger finger.
Before the tingling
down the spine,
there was the long
held breath
at the approaching
Apache horde.
I must have willed
John Wayne
to a thousand
dead Indians
before my father
informed me,
"They're all
just actors."
So from there,
it was on to
real people.
And in familiar places
not up there
on the screen.
Like the pretty blonde girl
in pigtails
when I was in
the fifth grade.
I kissed her
though I still cried foul
when John Wayne
swapped spit
with the heroine.
Ugh, was my reaction.
At first,
I hated it for real.
And then later
for the acting.
- John Grey
(featured in the poetry forum 02.26.09)
MERCY, MARTHA
Wind's whirling, flakes walking,
stiff brown leaves marching like soldiers.
Is this the winter you imagined?
You grew up in the day when
children tobogganed down hills
or skated on frozen lakes
but you're the only one here.
The world is indoors. Old people
sleep. Parents argue. Children
play video games, kill the
wind, flatten the flakes, mow
down the leaves with their weapons.
The real thing is forbidden.
You disobey, cheeks red, bones clattering,
a clump of wet snow in your fingers.
- John Grey
(added 12.02.08)
LESSONS IN SNEAKING OUT AT NIGHT
First thing is learn to
open and close the windows silently.
Grease them if you have to.
Every Gulag must have its reliable tunnels.
And come the late hour,
train yourself to not fall asleep.
Being wide awake at midnight
is as comforting as carrying a weapon.
As out the hatch, from house to tree
and to the ground you slip, tell yourself how
boring it will be when you can come and go
through the front door any time.
Head toward Main Street, a half a mile
away though it feels like you're going and going.
Meet the guys or the girl at the preordained
time and place, like they're anybody, anywhere.
Hang out for a while, with a moon that
slipped from under the sun's nose,
and outside a barroom where more
escapees cock whiskey-red noses at absent keepers.
Everything's forbidden: your breath, your laugh,
the words you speak that you don’t know
the actual meaning of. And the sidewalk is taboo.
The shuttered stores are outlawed.
The shimmering street lamps are everything
your parents warned you against.
And, instead of dreams, others just like you...
sin never boasted such a cast list.
Then sneak back in, from tree to wall,
through the frame of that window conspirator.
The good thing is that they wont know how
clever you are. The bad thing is the same.
- John Grey
(added 12.02.08)
OUT OF HARM
Meteors, like crime, happen to other people:
500 fragments raining down on the frozen surface of Tagish Lake,
a thousand pound clump smashing to Earth in an Arizonan canyon.
Sure, lightning strikes close, even incinerated a barn not three blocks from here.
But, in those three blocks, there's so many houses, so many lives,
such a buffer between you and I and the bad things that happen.
Moira's cousin was mugged, but that's Moira, not a close friend.
And just one cousin out of twenty three, who lives in Los Angeles, not here.
Besides, it was a mugging, not a murder. It's one random incident
happening just this side of nothing happening to nobody nowhere.
We're safe. Space debris can't harm us. The weather has other
people on its mind. And if the criminals were a little more petty
they'd be our best friends. It gets so I begin to believe that
you and I will live forever. Harm's way is not our way.
We can't wait to tell our bodies.
- John Grey
(added 12.02.08)
TO THE ONE WHO TAKES OUR PHOTOGRAPH
We're here. We know it. Now everybody
else must. Gothic St Maria's, the perfect
backdrop for Gale's hair. And all this piazza stone,
bright, rain-washed enough to make me handsome.
The river's brown though fetching but
I don't think we can fit it in the frame.
Nor the bridge with those carved cherubs
floating in its arch. Pity that.
Quick now. While the sun is out and there's no
pigeons flocking in the fountain. The
crowd is thin. The spray is full. So what if you're a
stranger and will never know the jealous audience
for whom this picture is intended.
Your hands are free aren't they. Your time's available.
We're smiling. Aim and click.
I swear the ones back home won't blame you.
- John Grey
(added 12.02.08)
RAIN TANK
Found an old rain tank
in the woods,
from the days when
this was farmland.
Inside
was moss
a million shades
of green and brown
and the stink
of a morgue full
of corpses.
Here was
the giver of life
long past the time
when the giving was done.
I turned the tap
and nothing came out.
Still, everything
has to start somewhere.
- John Grey
(added 12.02.08)
REGARDING SEX
We didn't know a thing then
but it's not as if all that we
were ignorant of
wasn't everywhere around us,
inside us even.
But, over time, we learned
a thing or two.
Why shouldn't we,
with it all so close.
So close, we could touch it.
So close, it did the touching.
- John Grey
SILENCE AT THE OTHER END
Phone rings. I answer.
No response. Someone's there.
I can hear breath, background noise.
I string together some "hello"'s,
a "what do you want."
I don't hang up. I take
the silence personally.
I need the contact. Anonymous
will have to do. Then I go quiet.
The mystery on the other end
continues. No crime by this.
Maybe the heart that has no way
to speak. Maybe the past, so lived
it can't live any more.
Eventually, a faint click on
the other end. Dial tone.
I hold the phone, connected
now to nobody but me.
I listen to darkness, pain, despair.
The message is from everything,
anonymous excepted.
- John Grey
MY AFFAIR
Time clock, my lover,
coaxes me out of figures
into slender steel arms,
always an hour up there behind that face
to draw me nearer to the bliss of five o'clock,
to sweep me out of the legendary insistence
of balance sheets, of pie charts,
of memos from head office.
All day long I have spoken
to its cherubim: office chit-chat,
bubbling water coolers, the private phone-call, the bathroom sanctuary,
but now it tempts me with the real thing,
freedom deeper than a kiss,
and, no longer ashamed of our relationship,
this unwilling conscript drops his weapon,
that gregarious mouse, zaps his P.C,
watches the monthly report on stationery charges
pop like a thought balloon,
a perfect green likeness of my absence
filling the terminal in its place.
I elope with the roller-coaster ride
of my own laughter
in tray and out tray abandoned
like unlovely twins at a dance,
my cubicle's cheap walls
shaking in the blessed fury of my rail-wind.
Down the corridor, past the guard-station,
until there, at the rim of the parking lot,
my body empties itself of
everything business mandates I should know,
gives birth to sunset beaming red and gold from
the midsize American car,
the gift of love my pay-check sends me.
- John Grey
NEWER THAN NEW DEVELOPMENT
another stretch of virgin woodland
bulldozed by developers
houses spring up
like weeds
Shady Acres
they call it
"For Sale" signs everywhere
what used to be
get it while it lasts
- John Grey
DRUNK ON LOVE
You haven't been drunk
until you've stumbled, tumbled,
fallen into a snow bank,
2 a.m., January,
prone and laughing,
moon overhead,
full and yellow.
chill coming at you
from all directions
but the warmth in your gut
from all that whiskey
convincing you it's
fighting back.
Haven't loved either
until the same thing happens.
You drop down into
the drifts, stay there
like a snow carving.
There's a grin on your face
like you're showing that
full moon what a new moon
looks like.
And you're taking in chill
from everywhere.
And the warm
can't give it away.
- John Grey
DEAR SIR OR MADAM
I write to an author
and tell him I'm an author.
I say I've read three of
your books so now it's
time for you to read
one of my unpublished ones.
I love lovers don't I
and they sure love back.
And whenever I'm on
foreign soil that foreign
soil gets onto me.
So, in the next mail,
expect a two hundred
page manuscript of
me reading you.
Sit back, enjoy,
the fruits of you
getting your stuff out there.
Just don't steal my plot
for your next one.
Or, at least, not
until I steal it.
- John Grey
THE ART OF KISSING
a daub of sweat
like a silver freckle
on your nose
a tuft
of yellow hair
escaping its barrette
lips slightly
fluttering ajar
like a curtain
in light wind
a sudden dip
of a shoulder
a slight concentration
in one eye
and the tremble
of a blue water lily
in the other
all at the moment
I suddenly
put away
my looking
- John Grey |
