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Four Poems
by John Grey

 

 

Odd One Out

Scorned.
No one listens to me sing.
Or watches me sweat at doing nothing
At listless play like a sick snake.
No one to comfort me.
Sun opens wide like dragon jaws.
This Lusitania day
is torpedoed by its own heat.
Laugh with myself
like puffs of breeze.
Then dusk,
when we all are shadows.
Words and looks climb down.
Loneliness gathers
at a bedroom window,
goes down well with distant stars.

 

a line, (a short blue one)

 

 

Sex Education

 

She’d already heard

all there was to sex

from her school friends.

She understood it as

the woman lies down

and takes it from the man.

So the book her mother

embarrassedly handed her

was somewhat redundant

but she took it to her room

to read anyhow.

It would have been

just another school primer

if it weren’t for the illustrations.

Eggs like no eggs she’d ever seen.

A Labrador mum nursing puppies.

Nothing new there.

But a woman suckling a baby was novel.

She’d heard the rumor

but here was evidence.

But body parts, in the main,

were drawn, not photographed.

The male looked like something

boys scribbled in the back of notebooks.

The girl was as flat

as the body she saw in the mirror,

with dots for nipples

and a curve like a smile below.

In the last chapter,

there were a series of shots

of two horses at it in a field.

The stallion was in his glory

but the mare’s face was grim.

There was no indication

that any good would ever come of it.

 

 

 

a line, (a short blue one)

 

 

The Military

 

They were all children,

no different from me.

They played with toy soldiers.

So did I.

 

We all turned our kitchen tables

or bedrooms floors

into our own personal battlegrounds.

We decided who lived, who died,

which army carried the day,

which one was vanquished.

 

Now, they’re older, majors and colonels,

and they wage war for real.

I am a poet.

I mean you know harm.

 

Their toy soldiers grew

into well-trained fighting men.

 

Mine are stored in the bottom of an attic trunk.

All of them regret what they have done.

 

 

 

a line, (a short blue one)

 

 

On A Desert Road

 

The mind plays tricks.

What I see

is not what I get.

I talk in monosyllables,

like steak chopped up

for easy ingestion.

More cactus.

More dust kicked up

by my wheel.

All around me

looks like the death

of civilization

as we know it.

So dry,

it would pay good money

for my spit.

And, in the distance,

a fake town emerges

from the foothills

of phony mountains.

It’s a ritual:

flat road,

barren ground,

mirage

and, not forgetting,

nothing but static

on the radio.

It’s how you get

to where you’re going

in these parts.

You start from nowhere,

drive through a lot of nothing.

The endpoint

only need be

a gas station and convenience store.

Final destination has it easy.

 

 

 

a line, (a blue one)

 

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