Featured Poet: John Grey
Good morning, today’s feature is John Grey, who also had one back in September. I’m happy to welcome him back and share a small handful of his poetry.
IN SEARCH OF THE LESS THAN PERFECT MAINE BEACH
In Maine,
some beaches
don’t just open up for you
like airport greetings.
Climbing down
black cliffs is required
to reach some thin wedge
of gray sand, drab wet stones
and the occasional tidepool.
An unsteady descent
takes a nervous soul
from the cliff-face dorms of the gulls
to the chilly cold surf below.
There’s no crowd to greet you
when you reach the bottom,
no one to cheer if a fall is broken
by the grasp of a sprouting bush
in the rockface.
It’s a solo climb down
and a solitary haven on arrival.
It’s freezing and the sea spits in your face.
Dark and shadowy
is this pit of a shoreline.
The sun won’t even follow you down.
LET’S TALK
When my body’s
been buried
and the eulogy
has been read
and the mourners
disperse,
when can I
expect the first séance?
I’ll be ready
on my side.
I write poetry.
I’ve been saying
“Hey it’s me”
all my life.
THE BRAIN POEM
For many years I’ve been living with this brain.
It’s supposed to be the source of all my wisdom
but the books keep insisting it’s just an organ -
some organ —no Bach cantata,
merely a registrar of all body pain
and, more often than not, its diabolical source.
Oh yes, this brain ensures that it gets to administer
its regular flogging, that it trusses me up in
the kind of willful thoughts that only enhance the suffering.
Some reckon that blob of cerebellum, pallium and ganglion
is no less than the soul in human form.
But if up here (touches his brow) is where I link with God
then He needs to ease up on the grip a little.
I have lots of inner living workings
but the brain is the only one
that informs me I’ll be dead someday.
Yes, that old honeycomb of nerves
is as morbid as an undertaker’s sales pitch.
It would surrender up its own cells
just to get its point across.
It’s an ego thing in many ways.
The brain relishes the fact that it can turn me
on and off like a light switch,
that my existence is subject its whims
and, only through its agency,
does me telling somebody my name
have a ring of truth to it.
My brain comes at me from all angles.
It can be whimsical or frustratingly subliminal.
It can lock into an idea and allow no fault-finding.
Or it can melt into mush
when something clear and confident is called for.
I can spend my nights groping with it
like twisting a hand towel.
Or screaming at it to shut down so I can sleep.
I can’t believe it comes from the same clay
as the totally inspirational heart
or the useful, if unromantic, bowels.
It’s a dictator more than anything.
No part of me can be healed until it says so.
It threatens to break down and leave me stranded
if I don’t agree with its latest concoction.
And it won’t leave pleasure alone,
saps the enjoyment with its demands that I quantify,
explain, the rest of my body’s gratification.
My brain is as rational as anything that totally accepts religion.
It boasts theories and it can explain away cruelty.
Just don’t try to feed it whatever another brain is peddling.
It devours criticism, spits on advice.
And it can go cosmic on me when
I’m trying to fix a leaking tap.
Or lascivious when respect is called for.
My brain collects things - garbage mostly -
whatever the neural equivalent is of a bottle cap,
a bus transfer or a cigarette butt.
It clogs itself like a bachelor’s sink.
And then, tired of the congestion, it frees up
by performing its version of an explosion.
My brain possesses none of the graces.
It’s part medulla oblongata, perfect for vomiting.
part hypothalamus to drive me to drink.
And its more bipolar than people with bipolar disorder.
It’s like an elevator that can push its own buttons.
I’m just along for the ride.
My brain can encompass nightmare and obsession,
bullshit and the plain facts.
It says it can fall in love with another but I just don’t believe it,
For a brain can only ever really love itself.
Now that’s a marriage made in hell and in heaven.
For better or worse is just my take on the subject.
FARMER’S DAUGHTER
Four horses in a field are leisurely munching.
The pigs gobble down slops as it’s their very last meal
but the grey mare, the white colt, the roan stallion,
and the pinto, are fully aware of the lushness around them,
believe in it, have faith that there will always be food enough.
The child calls the pigs, “greedy guts.”
But the horses are the angels she learns about in Sunday school.
Only creatures as ethereal as Michael and Uriel
can eat and eat, yet make no impact on the greens beneath their feet.
Only Raphael and Gabriel could trot so lightly and so swiftly
when the horses take flight, with ears pricked, tail swishing,
mane flowing and spreading like wings.
The child presses her face between the fence slats,
entranced by the saviors she will someday ride
to a better world..
And she peers into the pigsty where hogs and sows
squabble and gorge, sleep and snort.
It’s much like her life now.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, New English Review and Tenth Muse. Latest books, “Subject Matters”, ”Between Two Fires” and “Covert” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, Amazing Stories and River and South.
