The November Featured Poet is
John Grey
Please feel free to email John at: JGrey10233@aol.com
THIS IS THE LIFE
It's my version of a Sunday drive
into the country.
No one around,
I jerk open a man-hole cover,
slip down into the colon,
the bowels, of the city.
What used to be train tunnel
is scattering rat mesa,
or, the deeper I go,
the lair of the rats that don't scatter.
My tiny flashlight
weaves in and out
of skeletons and possessions,
some human,
some only depravity knows.
I hear a great liquid whoosh
not ten feet from me.
Someone or something is flushing.
Dark and dingy,
crumbling cement, rusted metal,
if I could crawl into my own heart
I imagine this is what I would see.
And smell.
The odor here would repel me
if I weren't what I came for.
Who, but me,
can seep up through your drainpipes,
ooze out of your sewers,
crash the party of your light.
No ten foot alligators down here.
No giant blood-sucking flukes.
Though I have the jaw for it.
And unquestionably, the thirst.
BE MORE THAN THE CITY CAN STAND
The stones are perverse,
the bricks in the walls, hateful,
the trash in the alleys, diabolical,
but worse are the people,
and the notorious echo
of their myriad heartbeats
drumming in me
like crazed tom-toms.
The assault is relentless,
automobile armies,
snarling traffic light dogs,
leering skyscrapers,
venomous cellars,
even the mouths
of the floating Styrofoam coffee cups
baring their brown-stained teeth.
I duck the store window weapons,
blink away the gutter eyes,
dodge the jaws of the swinging briefcase,
the ripping pincers of fire hydrants.
In a city out to get me,
how do I know
I'm not already cornered
coerced, swept up
and swallowed.
Stomach lining steel,
street intestines...
I show them my soul,
the seedy backrooms,
broken bottles, soiled newspapers,
stolen stop signs, cigarette butts,
and not forgetting
skulls and limbs and torsos,
a plethora of silent hearts,
my blood-soaked menagerie.
Be a city so vile,
that taste is still anathema.
YOU CAN'T GET RID OF ME THAT EASILY
Now that I've shed myself completely
of that bag of bones you buried in the cellar,
and have ascended, or at least
penetrated mud and cement
like sweat through pores,
I can address that tiny ear of yours,
the one that's not pressed to the pillow,
and confess I drank the toxic cocoa willingly
like I would have offered throat to cord,
breast to knife blade,
had those been your modus operandi -
I sipped and moaned, sipped more and writhed,
then finally gulped and buckled over,
just so I could have this moment,
a wraith, hag hair and bulging eyes,
in bed, in bath, in chair, beside you,
shadowing you room to room,
forever whispering, "I'm back."
Australian born poet, a United States resident since the late seventies, John Grey works as a financial systems analyst. He has recently been published in Jones Avenue, Weber Studies and Big Pulp with work upcoming in Poem, Pinyon Review, Prism International and the Evening Street Review.