Poetry By John Grey

Poetry by John Grey

A GUY HIT BY A TRAIN

Such a death,

just this side of the trestle bridge,

sets off a series of questionings and wonderings.

Was it suicide?

An accident?

Was the train travelling too fast?

Too slow?

Forget politics.

Forget famine and flood

in other parts the world.

And certainly ignore history.

It is a man dismembered by a locomotive

that best describes

how we reached this point in our lives/

Such a death

realizes what the global news

has attempted but failed to deliver.

This is why the world

is justifiable

only as a series

of attention-grabbing local headlines.

In order to be alive,

in order to make the coffee in the morning,

roll up into sleep at night,

something bad happening to someone else,  

is indispensable.

In this case,

we owe it all

to a guy hit by a train.

ROADKILL

Makes me think of states

of animal urgency.

Feed and procreate.

Everything else is man.

Survival –

short term – long term –

the only stimulant life needs.

And then the effect of a speeding car,

a rumbling truck,

that perfection of machinery

that makes so much of who’s steering it.

encourages the total fusion

of driver and steering wheel.

I see roadkill

and I can tell where this is all heading.

Down the road.

Not crossing it.

A MESSAGE FROM DON JUAN

A lover’s magnificence

is not measured

just by the passion he arouses,

or the style with which

he accomplishes what he sets out to do.

Like with great art,

he’s not just there to persuade,

to satisfy, gratify,

but to totally command

the situation.

Man – woman –

that’s a prescription for chaos

right there.

He must master that chaos,

compel it to take form

from the missionary

to the bare-back rider.

Yes, a great lover

can engender beautiful feelings,

a rapid heartbeat,

maybe even a gush of true pleasure,

as simple as it is sublime.

He must be a kind of god.

But no need to shower him

with hosannas.

Or flutter rose petals across

his chest.

Or sculpt his genitals in bronze.

A simple “thank you” is more than enough.

THESE CATALOGS

A Victoria's Secret catalog shows up in the mail.

Busty women flaunt their curves through the thinnest of pink and blue fabrics.

It's partnered by a gun catalog.

Buy a weapon and amuse your friends with a bullet between the eyes.

And what about this thick booklet advertising CD's that aren't available in stores.

It takes such willpower on my part to not send away for a Four Lads twofer.

Sealed dark plastic of course is a sure sign that nudist videos

are but a phone call away or my sex life can improve with an instrument

I might have witnessed during a torture scene on Game of Thrones.

This is my occasional insight into how the kinkier half lives.

I wish them well with their excruciating pain.

Even in this age of email, there's something to be said for what pops up in my mailbox.

Women in lingerie don't come to my door.

And nor do soldiers of fortune brandishing the latest in weaponry.

And the Four Lads, bless their harmonious singing voices,

aren't out there on my sidewalk, running through their greatest hits.

And nor is Madame Lash in her high heel boots and brandishing her whip.

It takes an advertising catalog to connect me to the world.

Lingerie models, gun nuts, long broken up vocal groups and purveyors of the perverse -

if only life were that simple.

YOUR SONOGRAM

The sonogram skis your oily belly.

At first, the picture is scratchy, snowy

like an off-the-air television channel.

But then something takes shape,

more formed, more robust,

than its fuzzy surrounds.

We're surprisingly calm, dispassionate even.

It's like looking at clothes in a washing machine

at the end of the cycle.

To be honest, I've no clue what I'm seeing

and you're waiting for the doctor

to translate his perpetual smile

into flesh and blood.

“There's the femur," he explains

at he points into the middle of the morass.

"And the twin brain lobes.

And look at those tiny tiny fingers."

He does a fine job

as a stand-in for our eyes.

"Would you like to know its sex?" he asks.

We both decline.

So we leave that place

accompanied by one last mystery.

There are months to go

before everything is revealed.

Until then, we will make up names

for both boy and girl.

We appreciate medical science's intervention.

But please, leave the diagnostic imaging to us.

A STORY NOT TO BE TOLD

So many details,

crystal-blue lakes,

dunes and blood-red dawns,

a crush of sheets

dew drops on roses -

how excited and proud he was.

But then he thought,

they still won't believe me.

From bathing in the sea together

to exposing her virginity to the whirlwind of his passion,

to drinking wine together into the wee hours of the morning,

it was all just his say-so.

He couldn't stride into a camp of guys

with that kind of information.

They'd laugh, tell him he was lying

for there was no way

he could produce the evidence

It would sound more like a fish tale

than the shifts and rebalances

within his own private world.

So she yielded, so what?

So he hadn't the imagination

to conjure up something as spectacular

as being with her

but they would still think he had

He had her by water, on sand,

in bed and the kitchen

but a word from him in company

and he would have had her nowhere.

So he clammed up,

kept her all to himself.

It was a relationship

heavy when it came to breathing

but light on bragging rights.

DIMENSIONS

I saw the old men sitting

on benches outside the hardware store,

sun through buildings striping them

like jailbirds, never to be released.

They didn't seem to talk much,

merely settled into what passed for comfort

as life sped by them,

on foot, by car, even in and out of that store.

One lit a cigarette.

One attempted to pat a Maltese dog trotting by.

Another closed his eyes,

his mind on that usual memory trawl

that leaves him alone and tired

and in the company of people

he has too much in common with.

I saw the old men and wondered

whether I'd be one of them someday.

I tried to imagine

how such a sedentary, passionless existence

could evolve from the life I'm living now.

Does movement no longer register

as something worth doing?

Or is it getting places that becomes passé?

And what about silence?

Is it what conversation

has been hungering for all these years?

And the/hardware store of all places -

is this the final statement -

to turn the back on

all those implements we can no longer wield?

For the moment,

that bench is fully occupied

so there is no place for me.

But as these old men die off,

space will become available.

I still dream.

I still desire.

For now it's each to our dimensions.

Some visionary.

Some merely physical.

No, I'm comfortably standing, thank you.