John Grey

ON THE FAR SIDE OF INVOLVEMENT

I walk by the shoeshine guy.
I don’t get my shoes shined.
And I pass a tobacconist
but buy no cigarettes.
Sorry, doctor’s office –
I’m just not sick enough today.
And you too, dentist.
My teeth aren’t perfect
but they’re good enough.
I can’t afford the art work
in any gallery
so I stride past the watercolor teaser
in the window.
I’ve no mail for the post office,
no wish to see what’s playing
in the cinema.
All of these people,
all of these places,
and even the ones
that might ordinarily speak to me
lose their way in my deaf ears.
I finally reach my apartment,
take the stairs to the third floor.
This place is no different
from the world outside.
If I didn’t live here,
I wouldn’t be here.

HOW THINGS ARE WITH ME

I have always planned my indirectness
like an architect.
Whatever moves you
must first leave you cold.
A bare hill,
the grass cut clean by yesterday’s goats,
a mediocre roundness,
a slope, as gentle, as uninvolving
as an old photograph
of people unremembered.
I know its mood
as surely as my own
but I leave your senses dangling
like a hook
over this wide bass mouth of words,
only snapping them together at the end
when having let you read so much,
I feel guilty
at playing on your hunger,
feed you like a child.
It was solitary like me as a boy,
boundaries cut clear by
this flat plain leading to it,
the distant forest,
a thunderhead rolling in,
gray and unwieldy,
for sun thwarted,
force fed on its own light
like a father
who’d rather choke on sentiment
than spill it.
It is asthmatic I imagine
and its ankles are weak
and it needs the support
of unlovely boots.
And maybe it sits up in bed
on humid nights
when sleep is impossible
and writes it all down
or builds a boy in its head
like I do a hill
as a sop to you supposedly
but I expect
in fear of what it’s really saying.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Shift, River And South and Flights. Latest books, “Bittersweet”, “Subject Matters” and “Between Two Fires” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Rush, Spotlong Review and Trampoline.