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.
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.
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.
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.
