Greyscale image of people walking in park - 5 Poems, Including "In My Younger Days" and "The Park in Stages"

POEMS BY JOHN GREY: In My Younger Days, The Park in Stages and more

In My Younger Days

I wanted to make no sense. To vanish.
To be as remote as photos of ancient ancestors.
Or to sit on the edge of a deep ravine.
Or be eaten away by acid rain.
I longed to die, feed the next round of violets and asters.
Or dye myself blue, mesh with the waters.
Anonymity is an art, twice removed.
Rather than be a peon in the real world,
I longed to be lord and master of an unconscious kingdom.
Why spill blood for disinterested causes?
Or carve statues of strangers?
Or donate my thumbs to the local hand museum?
And why should my nervous system make other people nervous?
So I tried to disappear while waiting for a bus.
And I went on strike when love first put me to work.
I did my best to lose, to feed myself to darkness.
But I was human, dammit. Still am.
But please, please, don’t make a fuss.

In Your New House

House, house you own,
house whose rooms you can paint
in purple polka dots, if that’s your wish.
Every door opens and shuts at your command.
The beds are made, unmade, depending on your whims.
And how many light switches are there? Eight.
On or off… you be the judge.
And the jury, likewise.

Someday a woman will join you
and then the choices will be spread,
maybe so thin they’ll be invisible to you.
But for now, the dishes in the sink
answer only to you.
They pile up.
You said they could.
And what’s on TV tonight? The fights?
The best that TV has to offer.
Someone wins.
You don’t lose.

A Reading

Everything written
comes with a body.
Yours was of the hairy prophet:
sunken chest, spindly legs,
but eyes stark, hypnotic, like Rasputin’s.

I spied your wiry frame
traipsing down Broadway
with a folder of poems under your arm,
head bowed,
abused sneakers snapping back and forth
at the sidewalk.

Everyone beloved from afar
is saddled with a need to feed,
to urinate, to scratch,
to spit blood in the gutter, from time to time.
This was you headed for some Village dive,
solitary and not a little sour
when a taxi almost ran you down.

And yet, there you were
on a makeshift stage
before a small crowd,
eager to hear God’s gifts
come out of your beer-sipping lips.

Inspiring words
must make their way
through an irritated throat, stumbling tongue,
before they can awe with pure language.
Raucous pity or bloody awe,
gaudy amazement or dazzled anger,
the audience latched onto any and all.
The tremor when you left them
was like they didn’t know whether
they’d been robbed or gifted.

At the peak of your fame,
at the crux of your cancer,
every good day
was just like that one.
Every bad day
was like every good day.

The Park in Stages

There’s the afternoon when the park’s at its busiest.
Every grill is steaming. Every table is laden with fixin’s.
The air above the sports field looks like something out
of a 1950s sci-fi movie with all those frisbee UFOs.

And there’s night, when the park hunkers down:
silent and solemn, a no-man’s land of shapes
between wide stretches of emptiness, swathes of
moonlight, owl hoots, the glowing eyes of a stray coyote.

I prefer the in-between time, when ducks nibble
on the last few crumbs of leftover bread, people head
home toting coleslaw and potato salad dregs, the first
shadows are creeping out from the overstuffed trash barrels.

I stroll among this dissipation of human activity,
see good times on their downslide into weariness,
baseball bats dragged behind young kids like tails,
and the ice cream truck pulling out into the street.

Change is palpable, the dark-light, the happy-sad,
the busy-stillness, the unambiguous-obscure.
I feel myself to be so much in the world.
And yet I sense what it is like without me.

The Time Between

Digging through a trunk in the attic,
I find, squeezed between a bronze baby shoe,
and a fake fox fur,
some old love letters.

To be honest,
feelings haven’t aged well.
The paper has yellowed
and some of the words are smudged
or faded.

But, according to what
I can barely make out,
you love me
and you always will.

The truth then.
All lies now.

And in between,
much yellowing, smudging, fading.

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image: Pixabay

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