Settle Down
Bits and Pieces
Old Pal
Bluesman on His Porch
I’ve scraped up enough of myself
for a beginning.
I’m willing to learn.
Come, teach me.
It’s taken me this long
to gather the parts,
to make what I could of them,
twenty years,
times when wisdom
didn’t care to hang with me,
and grief troubled me,
while joy baffled me,
and I grew remote
like trash washed up
on an Antarctic shore,
and as near as my handshake
and the sweat on my brow.
Some of me lived
in an apartment
with a pregnant woman.
Bits of me traveled,
in rough cities
and low-magic countryside.
I’m a piece of romantic,
a shard of pitiless bastard,
a sliver of forgetfulness,
a particle of despair.
But now I’m a lump,
patchwork, immobile.
I know you don’t speak, mirror.
But hold onto this face.
It hasn’t been back together long.
Let me stare until the seams don’t show.
The dreams come
back to me
in flotsam, jetsam.
A train rolls through
the living room.
An angel is impaled
on a cathedral spire.
An old school friend
is savaged by a crocodile.
A beautiful woman
fights off a sea monster.
Nothing is remembered whole.
Just bits and pieces.
So there is no meaning.
Only disparate images.
Random subconscious plot points.
In fact,
they may not even be
from dreams.
I have lived, after all.
And not everything is so
easily explained.
It's been so long since we last shared stagnant whiskey.
Or we sang of sleek and streamlined contours.
Or left our drunken paw-prints on a barroom's corner table.
Forgive me for not writing sooner.
Time has become such a fast moving, uninviting, uninvolving curiosity.
And money's been scarce.
Oddly enough, I have nothing to say.
I wrote a poem about you from time to time
but you have always given off the aura
of that haughty brand of editor
who likes to slam me with,
"Sorry but we don't publish poetry."
As in, sorry but we don't relive the past.
Or sorry but maybe we're not as close
as we like to think we are.
I'm not trying to sound superior or anything.
My piss hits the sea-lanes just like everybody else's.
But I drink alone and it suits these shorter days.
An then there's regret -
like an arrow, it soars and strikes and pierces me.
A pain so inherently simple
even I can understand it.
Zoom. Zap. Ouch.
What was your name again
a pact of melody and steamy heat,
of willing throat and emotional fire,
some chords to drive the evil spirits out,
others to invite them in
on a Louisiana backwater porch.
a woman cheats, a man takes revenge,
a sassy queen struts like a lynx,
a back near breaks from picking cotton
it’s Saturday night and the sun
is sinking into the swamp,
his fingers mine the fretboard,
worry the strings into a tune
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Penumbra, Poetry Salzburg Review and Hollins Critic. Latest books, Leaves On Pages and Memory Outside The Head are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Lana Turner and Held.
