John Yohe Poems

John Yohe has worked for the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service for sixteen years as a firefighter and now a fire lookout.


Pop Caps In The Asses of All Rhetoricians

Muthafucka be all academic and shit
Muthafucka be all Marxist Feminist Post-Structuralist and Post-Muthafucking Colonialist
Muthafucka real good about pleasing his professors when he was in college
Muthafucka be trying to write exactly like them
Muthafucka be in that gated university community
even tho muthafucka scared to death of the real life ghetto

Muthafucka waaay too good for community college
Muthafucka too good for developmental students
Muthafucka want all the so-called smart students for himself
Muthafucka ain't no low-class composition teacher
Muthafucka be a professor of literature
Muthafucka talking about Virginia Woolf with language Virginia Woolf would hate
Muthafucka want to be up in front of that class and profess how smart he is
Muthafucka probably smokes a muthafucking pipe
and not no muthafucking crack pipe either

Muthafucka can't write no poem
Muthafucka can't tell a story to save his muthafucking life
Muthafucka sure as hell thinks he knows more than the author tho
Muthafucka wants to make his students write just like him
Muthafucka can't understand why they can't
Muthafucka can't understand why they don't want to
Muthafucka can't understand why his students can't just be like him
and don't want to be like him

Muthafucka think Aristotle's the shit
He all obsessed with Ethos Pathos and Logos
But muthafucka jerk off just like everybody else
Muthafucka probably think about Virginia Woolf when he does
And since muthafucka still think all writing gotta have a conclusion
Here is my conclusion, muthafucka:
Here is me walking away

Poet John Yohe

Poem for Jaz

I like to think of you
dancing in the Fifth Quarter
in a tight white dress and high heels
feeling sexy
because I always felt that you never felt
how beautiful you were
because you weren't a skinny blonde
and I also hope that you know how funny
and smart you can be
if you let yourself
which is what I tried to tell you in my marginalia
though you seemed more interested in boys
at that point
and I'm sure the boys appreciated the attention
and if they didn't
they were fools

and I was never one for jello shots
and throbbing hip-hop—
I'd prefer to dance with you
to the music you were named for
though I do like to think of you
there
under that strobe light
smiling
and shaking that amazing ass


metalheads

what did the girls see in us?
we weren't that smart—
cut off our hair
and we would've just been nerds—
we were scrawny
skinnier than the girls themselves
and always wore the same jeans and black t-shirts
featuring a rotating cast
of demons and devils and pentagrams

we didn't play love songs
our guitars were percussion instruments
and we weren't romantic—
a good date was driving to Harpo's
to see Overkill and Motörhead—
and we didn't talk much
hiding our emotions
except for anger
on stage
mostly

and we drank
smoked pot
and didn't want to go to college
(though some of us did anyways)
and we didn't use condoms
we all had porn stashes
and spent our paychecks on tattoos
wanting to be rock stars

the girls seemed to believe in us
more than we did
and carried our guitars and cymbals
and bought us cigarettes
and listened to our practices
and drove us to gigs
and sometimes even gave us blowjobs

and when our bands broke up
when we stopped playing our instruments so much
the girls waited a little while
enough to confirm what we already knew
and now their hairspray
and lipstick
and high heels
are gone:
we weren't the gods
they wanted us to be