The Old Coffee House, by John Grey

The Old Coffee House
by John Grey

It’s shuttered now,
this life of the mind.
It no longer accommodates
the passion, the pretension,
of fervent twenty-year-olds.

Wiser souls tell me
that’s what universities are for
not coffee houses,
that knowledge is lectured downward,
not launched from below.

But college education
fades with the diploma.
Voluntary learning
has always been more lifelong.
And where else could you
sip the one cup of joe
into the early hours of the night.
And discover, to your eyes’ delight,
that pretty women
often dressed in black.

I peer through the window.
There’s just some tables, chairs,
shunted to the side.
The local art is gone from the walls.
And outrageous theories
are no longer accepted as currency.

Here was my introduction to Gide and Camus,
Modigliani and the Fauves.
Stockhausen and Buffy Sainte-Marie
I slept elsewhere.
But this has always been my address.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Sheepshead Review, Stand, Washington Square Review and Floyd County Moonshine. Latest books, Covert, Memory Outside The Head and Guest Of Myself are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the McNeese Review, Santa Fe Literary Review and Open Ceilings.

Old Bodies For New, by John Grey

Old Bodies For New
by John Grey

When sorrow wearies me,
I go off in search of miracles,
new buds on the dead branch,
crocus poking through the melting snow.

They’re lowering one more inmate
into the earth.
Worms lick their chops.
Worms, I suppose, are miracles in their way,
breathing on the body
Likewise, the moss that grows
where nothing should live.
And the weeds, unloved,
but that doesn’t stop them sprouting.

When I’m so tired of missing someone,
not even a memory can soothe,
I break down people into fragments,
feed them to the world.
What worms cannot devour,
moss covers.
What moss cannot make safe,
the wild grabs joyously.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Sheepshead Review, Stand, Washington Square Review and Floyd County Moonshine. Latest books, Covert, Memory Outside The Head and Guest Of Myself are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the McNeese Review, Santa Fe Literary Review and Open Ceilings.

Dawn Poem, by John Grey

Dawn Poem
by John Grey

It always takes sky for its cue,
never streets, the houses,
the few with lights on.
Clouds are nothing.
Not even gray can worry it.
I have to think it beautiful
no matter what.
It’s a film God made.

And its back story is
that what shines through windows
matters more than lover,
job, family, thirsting for a drink,
nervous for a cigarette.
Like I said, even when it’s
gray overhead as shed roofs,
it still shines more than people.

My waking doesn’t influence it
one way or the other.
And what it did yesterday
is merely a suggestion.
It offers hope because
that’s its job.
Even when there isn’t any.

Can you believe
that there’s been more dawns
than all the weeds in Connecticut,
the eyeballs in China.
The sun parks
somewhere in the universe
like burning gases will.
And the earth turns
because otherwise
half the planet would
have the nightclubs,
the other half, the ball-fields.

Poets are drawn to it, of course.
Some write up the colors
like it’s an assignment
from their soul’s last English class.
Others merely scribble
how crappy the new day
makes them feel.
The hour’s alive with coffee.
Thanks to dawn,
a farmer in Bolivia
can feed his family of six.

I’m on the porch,
don’t know really what to make of it.
Half-yawn, half appreciation,
half sips of java.
That’s more typical of my math
than my feelings.
I knew a woman called Dawn once.
Many a night she lit my way
but never in the morning.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Sheepshead Review, Stand, Washington Square Review and Floyd County Moonshine. Latest books, Covert, Memory Outside The Head and Guest Of Myself are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the McNeese Review, Santa Fe Literary Review and Open Ceilings.

Dream And Ecstasy, By John Grey

Dream And Ecstasy
By John Grey

Here, where art gets out from under,
truths bleed
the aspects of this changing world
make us think about states
of animal passion,
what nature wants,
what it attempts,
winter abstract,
spring emboldened,
a summer of the purest type,
then, half brown, half-naked,
fall’s imperfect sketches,

To the Dionysian spirit
more artistic audacity,
more chaos reaching out to form,
and here I am,
in my best procreating smock,
up to my old autobiography,
splashing paint on a mirror.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Sheepshead Review, Stand, Poetry Salzburg Review and Hollins Critic. Latest books, Leaves On Pages, Memory Outside The Head and Guest Of Myself are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Ellipsis, Blueline and International Poetry Review.

Sam’s Last Days, by John Grey

Sam’s Last Days
by John Grey

Grotesques. My upper teeth nibble on
the lower. Soon, they’ll be nothing but white ash.
Skin sags. Cartilage wonders why it bothers.
And my eyes… at what stage do they quality
as permanently red. My mouth wants to
swallow my red nose. In one raving gulp
of course, because my bite is busted.

Snow storm outside. So the weather too is collapsing
under its own weight, Maggie is out there somewhere
refilling her pills. Soon enough, it all subsides and
the ground is left looking like this gigantic dead sheep.
But it’s the inside that smells like a carcass.
It’s the thinning hair on the head of a man,
the broken bowstrings of the heart. And the fingers
are like cars skidding on ice, left touch behind
ten years ago.

Insane. My next thought is hammering my last.
My pulse swirls like that witless dancer in the
spiked red shoes. And then it screams loud as ajay.
And then it quiets like the last flakes on the window.
Maggie knows the answer. It’s tiny blue capsules.
The reaper is smug. He scythes with fire-place flame.
Or tries to sell me eyesight on the TV. Or better
bones. Or a stupendous sex life. Since when
was bullshit all I have left to spend my money on.

Wind gives up the ghost though the ghosts are real enough.
Roof is heavy. Front porch is a wasteland.
And there’s Maggie crawling home from the pharmacy.
Needs are served if that’s what you believe.
I’d rather feel every hurt, each twinge, all the footnotes
to my own destruction. Dying ought to be like living.
For if it’s just death, what’s left to humanize.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Soundings East, Dalhousie Review and Connecticut River Review with work upcoming in West Trade Review, Willard and Maple and the MacGuffin.

That Storm At The Lake, by John Grey

That Storm At The Lake
by John Grey

There was something about that feeling
as if oppression and heat had followed us to the lake,
as if that same thunderhead
linked this solitary spot to the city.
We sat back on the banks and watched the dark sky move in,
felt that sag in the way of things
and then heard that rumble from somewhere off
like the distant guns must have sounded in Paris.
All that journey and we hadn’t gone anywhere.
But then lightning ignited the sky
and a crack of thunder boomed so loud
it shook the distant mountains
and rain started to come down
so hard we thought we’d drown in it.
We sat there, didn’t move.
If we were in the city, we would have scattered,
raced for shelter.
We were drenched to the skin
just so we could be some place we were.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in Sin Fronteras, Dalhousie Review and Qwerty with work upcoming in Blueline, Willard and Maple and Red Coyote.

From One Place To Another, by John Grey

From One Place To Another
by John Grey

How did I ever come by this sense of dread
when all I’m doing is moving from
one town to the next?
Why does everyone I drive by
seem so content in these places where they live,
even when they obviously rent.
Why do they all look as if they’ve been
there forever, as if their bones, their skin,
are just part of the house’s carapace
along with the windows and the shingles
and the shutters.

Why is my heart pumping
like a dozen of these hearts?
I look in the eyes
of a woman in a garden.
They are blue and broad
and making a stand there.
An army of moving vans
would not budge her from her roses.

So why do I move so easily
through the streets?
Why, even when I’m driving,
does it feel as if the wind is blowing me?
I feel like a traitor
to that first house we ever bought.
If this neighborhood had its way,
it’d line me up against a white-paneled fence
and shoot me.

Miles ahead of me, another house awaits,
its family of ten years
on a journey as weird, incomprehensible as mine.
We may even cross each other’s paths,
a look of fear, of understanding,
flashing between us.
They may be heading for a house
sold cheaply because the last
of its occupants passed on.
It makes me think of the dead
and the reluctant moving they must do.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in Sin Fronteras, Dalhousie Review and Qwerty with work upcoming in Blueline, Willard and Maple and Red Coyote.

If In Doubt, Remember, by John Grey

If In Doubt, Remember
by John Grey

Strange how a sentimental mood
wipes clean all recent details.
Ten years of hearing, seeing,
touching, tasting,
vanished like my last breath.
Such a sense of utter solitude.
Do people even speak anymore?
Do they draw near?
All is remote, events seem dimly,
but how aware, the half-conscious.
I’m in a lost, forgotten corner of the earth
journeying to a lost, forgotten corner of my mind.
As existence moves away,
I can slip out,
stay increasingly behind.
The present is the illusion here.
I have that feeling about me now
of a long time ago.
Mankind has left in its boats.
I’m the shore, the last memory.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in Sin Fronteras, Dalhousie Review and Qwerty with work upcoming in Blueline, Willard and Maple and Red Coyote.

The Squabbling Neighbors, by John Grey

The Squabbling Neighbors
by John Grey

They’ve been married ten years,
she once told me.
Must have been quite a wedding day,
I’m thinking.
I can just see and hear the preacher –
“Do you, lazy motherfucker
take stupid bitch
to be your lawfully wedded wife.
And do you fat trollop
take drunken bum to be your
lawfully wedded husband.”
And then a couple of
snarled “I do’s”,
a funeral march
down the aisle
and out the door of the church
where interfering old cow,
freeloading halfwit
and catty witch,
throw confetti.
What a honeymoon that must have been
bouts on the beach,
scraps in the bar,
sixteen rounders in the bedroom.
And here they are still together.
You have to wonder what
brainless idiot and useless lump of lard
still see in one another.
But who can explain true love?
Of course, they do as good a job as any.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in That, Dalhousie Review and Qwerty with work upcoming in Blueline, Chronogram and Clade Song.

One Kiss, One Train, by John Grey

One Kiss, One Train
by John Grey

Without first love, there’d be no love.
The rest of the loves
are just sorrowful old men and women
with battered suitcases
standing on drab platforms
for trains that never come.
Still, we convince ourselves
that the standing and the waiting
is the true love,
with its baggage at both our sides,
with that shared stare down the barren track
for sign of something.
I can’t kiss the woman
from twenty years ago
so I lean over and kiss the one next to me.
It’s the nearest I get to that other kiss.
It’s like her cheek is a scrap-book
and I’m pasting
a twenty year old clipping into its pages.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in That, Dalhousie Review and Qwerty with work upcoming in Blueline, Chronogram and Clade Song.