MOVING DAY CRIME SCENE
When it’s happening, we feel like burglars
robbing ourselves, ransacking the house,
stealing every piece of furniture
and clothing, each book, vacation memento,
the CD’s, the food, the brooms, the umbrellas,
the plants in pots, even the dog’s bowl.
You name it and we steal it from
the unsuspecting people who’ve
livedt here all these years.
We look back from the end of the street
and see, with nothing left to hold it together,
time collapse upon itself.
It’s like a great eraser abrasing its
way across a chalk-board, rubbing
the lives, their meaning, into oblivion.
A FARM OVERGROWN
I scour
the rocky soil
where my father
lost his belief
in God’s munificence.
Lyric forest embalms
old hopes
of making a living.
Only some stumps
and abasement survive.
Oh there’s a harvest here
all right
but it lacks the human hand,
merely ratifies.
beauty’s way with failure.
In pebbles,
the generations end,
the names, the dates,
stripped like bark
from the green veneer.
But it’s just the wind,
the shuffle of brush,
amiable bird song
mixed up with
harsh-throated warnings.
In my father’s wake,
everything’s
sprouting and growing,
blooming and shedding.
But nothing takes root
like the stones.
MORNING SPIDER
I’m up early, early enough to watch the night slip away.
As always, I’m at the bottom of a mountain.
As always, I am non-committal as to my first step.
I just sit here as new sun nudges away bits of shadow.
I amuse myself with straight lines because I can’t see where
the bent ones go. Coffee begins its occupation of my veins.
My eyes roll around my face, then settle in their sockets.
The cat, with a chrysanthemum in its lapel, rubs my ankles.
The mountain is descending itself. At hill height,
it looks up and, with mighty breath, blows its own head off.
Then it flattens out. I can walk across it.
Light enters the room, is selling uncut flowers.
Above, one sky stands in for all the skies that could be.
It’s the ceiling, like a canvas, where, in a far corner,
a solitary spider signs his name.
NEW MORNING
On a new morning,
the reds, burnt oranges,
of dawn,
fade into fresh light
that becomes
the final arbiter
of stale darkness
and black sky gives way
to pale blue
and downy clouds,
as trees
flap in the brief
flute notes of the breeze
and sunrays
burn away
tiny drops of
water on the grass tips,
wake the flowers,
draw out the petals
from their nighttime fold.
THE WORLD OUTSIDE WHERE IT BELONGS
I am awake,
fingers slow burning
as they grip hot coffee,
heart, a Geiger counter
finding love in your still sleeping body,
and, on the other side,
brain pecking through
the grievances
already assembled
in my thoughts,
in the newspaper glaring
from my laptop.
The world is a sorry place
but the people in it
find such comfort
in nothing more than
a shape in the sheets,
a soft breath contesting
the solid headwinds of my own.
Strangers die
but loved ones live.
Soldiers kill
but no harm comes
to those in bedrooms.
Soon, you too will
rouse from sleep and dreams,
reconvene with what keeps
you up at night:
the wars,
the inequalities,
the murders, the rapes,
the homeless
in their winter blues.
It’s a dangerous world.
We are safe.
Life turns ugly.
We are beautiful.
Others are what we read about.
We’re what we believe.
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.
