Golden Years
A Mind on Friday
The Meal of Us
My First Time in the South
Forty Years Ago
Getting the Fire Started
The Man With the Gun on His Hip
She's Shopping in the Past
Three Plus Three
A Man She Doesn't Recognize
Surviving the Dump
The Man Who Walked Out
1993.
Nothing brought closure.
1994.
Dated girl whose favorite TV personality
was Jerry Springer.
1995.
Local Burger King shuttered for good.
1996.
First cellphone. First encounter with a telemarketer
in a public space.
1997.
Turn to alcohol for strength and support.
1998.
Catholic church’s definition of mortal sin
widened to include some of my habits.
1999.
Friend borrows Bob Marley CD and doesn’t return it.
2000.
KKK march takes a short cut down my street.
2001.
Discover I have no roots to get back to.
2002.
Grovel more than I care to.
2003.
Car in garage. Forced to take bus for first time in ten years.
2004.
Initial feelings of nostalgia for 1992.
2005.
Humiliated, not once, but twice.
2006.
Two months of jury duty in a case
involving mathematic thesis plagiarism.
2007.
No one wants to hear me complain about
the sheer lack of gravitas and originality
displayed by American Idol contestants.
2008.
The Oscars no longer do it for me.
2009.
Finally come to the realization that internet porn is boring.
Cut my online time by 30%.
2010.
Third World still starving.
My guilt quotient has never been so low.
2011.
Have never heard of the rapper
whose the current biggest deal in rap.
2012.
Accidentally find myself in a Target Toy department,
can’t imagine the young me wanting any of this stuff.
2013.
A decade has passed since I was last implicated in a scandal.
2014.
No longer get excited by the sight of women doing their nails.
2015.
Attend corporate meet-and-greet but make no meaningful contacts.
2016.
Only three boxes ticked off in top ten work and life goals set
way back in 1991.
2017.
Finally admit to the word “crap” in describing my job.
2018.
Put on the spot by annoying academic friends,
“To be or not to be” is the only Shakespeare I can quote.
2019.
There are no more things in heaven and earth, Horatio.
2020.
For example, Horatio – golden years.
2021.
Golden years? You’ve got to be joking.
2022.
Golden? Years?
It’s Friday but it’s not really Friday.
It’s Friday in the office
which is really Monday in disguise.
And a Monday that is slower
than the Monday before last Tuesday,
It’s a Monday that controls the clocks,
turns them back in time
when I’m not looking.
It’s not Friday until five o’clock.
And that’s an hour that this
masked Monday is determined
won’t get here.
“Will this day never end,”
the guy in the next cubicle sighs.
It’s a rhetorical question.
And that’s a question that’s not
really a question.
It’s a question
that’s an answer in disguise.
I am a lover among eaters.
To me, your eyes are the special
of the day while, all around me,
the mob scrapes back their chairs,
stumbles toward the salad bar.
Across the table, my hand gently
rubs your knuckles. But the man behind
me hones his radar on the waitress.
The family to the side gnaw greedily
on their ribs like it's the last meal on earth.
Our conversation, though low, is saturated
with our feelings. Sure, it's drowned out
by "Pass the wings", "Where's the Tabasco",
but how easily it breathes. By the end of
the night, the busboys will have stacked
up every soiled plate, wiped clean every
table-cloth. The floor will be vacuumed.
The menus returned to their docking station.
The people will be fed but how it happened
will be more fog than memory.
But we'll still be these lovers.
Our eyes will keep watch on the other's.
Our hands will somehow, someway,
find a way to touch.
It's like we never left the restaurant.
Or the meal before that. And the one before that.
In this world, there's feeding
and then there's the endless feast.
I’ve been in Tennessee two days
and I’m already dropping g’s
and my vowels stretch
like a body on a rack.
The sounds around no longer confirm
the peculiarities of my New England accent.
At first, my ears are baffled.
But, soon enough, they give my larynx,
my tongue, instructions.
Speak this way if you want to be understood.
By the end of the week,
I could pass for a “good old boy”
as long as the locals don’t drill me
on my politics or music taste.
And, at breakfast, I resist the urge
to grimace at my first mouthful of grits.
I swallow and smile
then nudge the rest of them politely
to the edge of my plate.
In the hotel bar,
I even strike up a conversation
with a young woman
whose every tenth word is “y’all”
in a voice as shrill
as a train whistle.
But her lightning-bug eyes
dazzle my heart’s mason jar.
I plan to screw the lid tight
while the Nashville night is young.
Eternity dressed up as Sunday afternoon.
Sun stretched it, lightheartedness likewise.
Comfort even took out its rule and measured the hours.
I was six, safe, cocooned, and throwing a ball.
I had been to church, renewed God's protection.
The dog jumped up to catch my missile a thousand times.
He returned it to me in anticipation of the next toss.
Sunday dinner, that other host, body and blood
of my mother this time, settled in my stomach
like tired kids in a warm, soft bed.
And that ball's arc was the hands of the clock
that holds time still, that doesn't do hours and minutes,
only reflection in light-gauzed windows.
I remember this because now days are as shrunken as these apartments.
Sure, the food's better because the money's better,
but it's just food, not connotations, and my sour stomach knows it.
The clock's a clock and it ticks like God almighty.
Which reminds me, I haven't been to church in years.
Still, my sister's coming over later.
We'll thumb through photographs, laugh and sob over some of them.
Putting names to faces in others will be enough.
Maybe there'll be one of me at six years old,
in our back yard, with my face lit, ball just released, the dog into his jump.
He'll catch it sure but he can't bring it back to me.
I'm up before her, must get the fire started,
need more wood, step out the door into bitter cold.
Love is the last thing on my mind.
My bundled-up body navigates the frozen lawn,
head down, stumbling about
like an Antarctic explorer,
one who didn’t make it back to base camp.
With an armful of lumber,
the return trip in sub-zero temperature
has me close to extinction
until I somehow make it to the door,
avoid crashing to the floor
as I cross the threshold.
Then, soon enough, the fire is roaring,
the rooms are baking warm.
And I can hear her waking.
Soon, she'll be downstairs and thanking me.
Once again, the hero gets the girl.
It's his reward for not even thinking of love.
The Man With the Gun on His Hip
He strides down the street
with a weapon strapped tight
to his side.
Some slip by him
with their heads down.
Others give the man a wide berth.
“Maybe he’s a crazy,”
they’re thinking.
“What if he suddenly
just starts shooting indiscriminately.”
He’s on his way
to the smoke shop
for a pack of cigarettes.
But he has managed
to cause a few hearts to tremble,
nerves to flutter,
even a mind or two
to think the worst.
I’ve often been seen walking
with a book under my arm.
That causes no panic
that I’m aware of.
But, then again,
those passersby
haven’t read the book.
I follow her into a vintage clothing store.
It's cold outside.
I'll take the warm
at the cost of my embarrassment.
She's drawn to the hats immediately,
lifts a wide-brimmed fancy flowered Victorian
with both hands,
alights it gently on her brown tresses like a crown.
She parades before the mirror,
turns from frontal to profile and back again,
is her grandmother as a bright young thing,
but aloof and discrete,
allowing herself a smile
only if it's dignified.
Then she switches to something
for the flapper, a cloche hat to
bring out the silent film star
in the twenty first century woman.
Then a bohemian beret
whisks her off to Greenwich village.
And a red and black platania in velvet
escorts her to a debutant ball.
She's enjoying the lunacy
of the chance meeting
with all these other selves.
Something plain tight fitting,
suitable for the World War II widow,
puts an end to the parade.
Real people wore these,
happiness, grief,
that cannot fit so easily
on a stranger's head.
I’m relieved that
she doesn’t look good in it.
When he touched her body,
he did it three ways.
One of the three was recognition.
The second was comfort.
The third was unabashed desire.
Her sensations had a choice:
combine the three
or deal with them one by one.
Then he kissed her three times.
The first kiss was a voyage of discovery.
The second, a tasting.
The third, unmitigated passion.
More pleasure
to amass or amalgamate.
She chose to multiply.
He’s at the kitchen table,
pouring bourbon into a glass
but, when the hand shakes,
even simple is hard.
Some spills
so he laps it up like a dog.
Even the drop that lands on the floor
hears it from his tongue.
His body needs bracing,
that’s the problem.
And there’s a mob inside his head
cheering him on.
In between glugs,
he shouts twisted things about people.
He smiles to himself.
He’s getting high and they’re not.
His wife is in bed,
curled up in quiet hysteria.
The clink of glass is like
a shard stabbing her.
It’s the job, he says.
It’s the bills.
It’s his old man who left him
nothing but undying thirst.
Fear and pity are what
get her through nights like this.
And to think,
once she worshiped the guy.
But hair’s thinned,
eyes have bloodied,
muscle’s sagged,
and optimism has cratered.
A man she doesn’t recognize
will stumble into bed soon.
A man she doesn’t recognize
will smell like a recyclable bin.
A man she doesn’t recognize
will wake up sick and sorry.
A man she doesn’t recognize
she knows only too well.
My mother warned me severely not to go anywhere near the dump.
She rattled off all the diseases I could catch there.
Not just polio and typhoid fever. She even included cancer.
They way she told it, the dump was worse than crossing
a heavily-trafficked street or being approached by a stranger.
But that mountain of trash, gleaming in the sun,
patrolled by sea-gulls, was a bigger draw than the backyard swing
or the football I’d kicked ten thousand times already.
So I snuck off one Saturday, slipped through one of many holes
in the dump’s wire fence, joined a bowerbird crew of scruffy looking men,
one or two women in ragged muumuus, and a few kids my age,
for whom anything that could fit in their pockets was a treasure.
The smell was foul. Fly squadrons launched sorties.
And rats were unafraid to show their bewhiskered faces.
But I found a bent spoon. An empty medicine bottle.
A water-stained paperback with a perfectly lurid cover.
I wiped them clean as best I could, hurried off home
before my mother was even aware that I’d been gone.
As if I didn’t know already, all of her cautioning proved bunk.
But the innocent face I put on was something new.
It came naturally. I didn’t have to work on it.
I sequestered my discoveries in the bottom of a drawer,
took them out from time to time when no one was around.
I found no use for them, not even the book,
but they served as mementos from a time I disobeyed
all instructions and yet still got away with it.
A year from then, I tossed those prizes in the trash.
Spoon and bottle and paperback no doubt found their way
into one of those heaps of garbage. I kept nothing from the
experience. Not even my modest triumph.
He’s just a crumbled statue
abandoned in a desert wasteland,
the family Ozymandias,
stone-faced, mute,
swept over by winds of sand.
Once this was all greenery,
flushed with blue rivers,
thick brush, tall trees, wide meadows.
But, in becoming a monument,
he killed the surrounds.
Some say, he walked out,
abandoned his family.
But I knew him as a sculptor,
constantly chiseling his presence
in place.
I cannot hate the man.
Yet I admire, in a way,
what the desert has done to him.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, River And South and The Alembic. Latest books, Bittersweet, Subject Matters and Between Two Fires, are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Paterson Literary Review, White Wall Review and Flights.
