john grey
three poems
Walking Home Late at Night
Welcome to a nightmare
of tar and concrete.
It’s the way home.
Wind’s blowing sweet
but it’s a pathological liar.
I part ways
with streetlamp shine,
take a short cut through an alley.
Disturb a cat.
Step over a sleeping drunk.
The city feels old and ruined.
Not even the neon
is bright enough for magic.
And it’s eleven at night.
No matter your street-smarts,
you can’t know it all.
This is a neighborhood
where I could just as easily disappear
as make it back to my third floor apartment.
Who’d know?
Like who’s the guy
on the motorcycle that zips by,
his face encased in a helmet?
He could be a gal. Or a ghoul.
In a dream, he’d be someone I knew
from long ago.
But not in this place.
Not at this time.
Bar noise keeps me company for a block.
I tell some hooker I have other plans.
A pusher rises up out of a man-hole.
A junkie descends the same way.
A panhandler thrusts his sign in my face.
It says he’s ex-military.
He’s now in the homeless army, he says.
This street is his commission.
Shadows are longer here.
Threats come prepared with silence.
Footsteps don’t add onto themselves
like they do in the daylight.
They separate, stand alone.
Are more vulnerable that way.
And hell on the people making them.
And thoughts join in,
give aid to the enemy.
Like a crazy with a knife
could stab me.
Or a mugger take me down
with a gun.
That’s what it’s like when a place
won’t spread out,
just closes in.
For you can’t rise above a city.
You can only sink down into it.
Very little is at eye-level.
The rest must be seen with the gut.
How It Is With You
you claw at bed sheets
you don't eat
you think it's unfair
you want to tell
your visitors to fuck off –
you’re trapped by
your body’s inability to heal -
you’d rather die
than keep your carers in business
How Can You Be This Sweet?
You're joking, right?
You've just found
a different way
to be like all the others.
Scratch your soft skin
and there's a hardness underneath.
Bust open the cache of
your truthfulness
and lies tumble out.
Confess you're not my lover,
you're my poisoner,
that when the world goes to war
you're right there with it,
loading up the tanks,
mounting the cannon.
Sure, you're curled up
in my arms
but aren't you really out
there somewhere
robbing banks,
pushing old ladies down
steep staircases?
Of the many millions,
there's just one
that I want kissing me
so how could it be you.
Maybe you're just
filling in for her.
Maybe you had to kill her
to take her place.
24 February, 2021