JOHN GREY

 

Away From Home

 

I'm not the expatriate you take me for.

Yes, this is Providence, RI

but I tote my origins around with me.

 

The land never just is for a moment.

It derives from me.

Otherwise, it's just a name,

a pretty color on a map.

 

You ask me if I miss it.

But I have the convict heart.

My head constantly

circumnavigates

the shore-line.

My soul travels so far inland

it's been gifted with

an aboriginal name.

 

Winter blows in.

No big deal.

I'm the sub-tropics, shrunken maybe,

but a steamy jungle in thick shirt,

pants, and overcoat.

 

And the accents

come at me from all sides:

Boston Brahmin,

Federal Hill Italian,

Fox Point Portuguese,

hip-hop at the south end of the city.

How can this not be foreign,

you ask me.

But my ears are one thing.

My voice is quite another.

 

The more I move, the truer my stasis.

I live where I go to but I am where I'm from.

 

Inner City, Saturday In Summer

 

I get happy just parking the car.

The street’s a party and I’m the first one to arrive.

The sun is huge and orange.

And I’ve nothing in mind, not much more in body,

just hanging out.

 

I’m on a street of strangers

and yet I feel as if I know them all.

Maybe it’s the vehicle I brought along as my date.

Its metal is warm. Color appealing.

Some kids gravitate toward it.

Their older brothers and sisters

come down off their stoops.

 

It’s suddenly busy just like joy ought to be.

Outside of me is well catered for,

so the inside doesn’t have to worry.

So much is suddenly happening.

A boom box orders dancers out onto

the sidewalk floor.

Some guy flexes the tattoo on his upper arm muscle.

A death’s head was never so alive.

And the skirts are as short as the days are long.

I was expecting jeans but brown legs show up instead.

 

The inner city doesn’t need too many trees.

The few, deftly planted, give off just enough.

The park, barely bigger than the front page of a tabloid newspaper,

teems with some who know each other, some who don’t,

scatters the neighborhood’s small squirrel population.

 

Some old guy with half a mouth of teeth,

smiles wide enough for light to fill the other half.

He ditches his shabby coat,

removes one shoe,

lolls on a bench and spreads his arm wide.

 

The sky’s wide and blue

like it’s blown in from Montana.

The block is like one big open-air parlor.

It’s summer.

Even the homeless have got a home.

 

The Roadkill

 

Late at night,

I see a lump of something

at the side of the road.

I slow down.

It’s a deer,

smacked by something

that had to be really traveling.

No, not something.

That’s just the excuse.

There’s a someone behind this.

 

Here’s the result of someone careless,

drunk probably,

car lights pointing one way,

their eyes looking another,

light winding with the road,

a thump, a shock, then moving on,

now home and laughing the whole thing off.

 

It’s other people who stiffen me, ice my blood.

They plough through whatever’s in the way.

They just don’t see what I see.

 

Special Children In The Park

 

The game is baseball – supposedly –

but it’s really participation,

tossing a ball, swinging the bat,

and running – always running –

here, there,

more where it’s green and lush

than on any basepath.

 

Spectators try not to judge –

these are children after all –

not human missteps,

not other-world beings

trying their best to live in this one.

 

Just accidents of birth

now sharing in the accidents of life –

a hit to the infield,

picked up and then tossed

three feet in the air,

a dash to first

that ends in a stumble,

a fall, a bruised knee –

things that happen to all of us,

in other circumstances,

in different ways –

these kids take on their own failings –

as, in the cause of what we’re made of,

we do ours.

 

The Evil That Eels Do

 

The eel,

a snake among fish,

slithers between rocks

in its cold-water den.

 

I don’t drop the line

for this bottom-hugger,

have no wish to snare

that slime-green creature

as it slips under a slab ledge

as if wary of the rippling light.

 

But I observe

with furtive fascination

like slowing for a traffic accident

or listening in as neighbors argue.

 

It wriggles,

dig temporary sand ravines,

scrapes its stomach

on random pebbles,

then lashes out at a minnow,

sucks it down with an electric gulp.

 

The eel does no more

that what instinct decides,

hunger finds necessary,

yet I instill, in its twists and squirms,

an evil more pertinent elsewhere.

 

So for as long as this creature

repulses me for no good reason,

a politician, a predator,

a pimp, a pusher,

will continue to get away with it.

 

JOHN GREY

 

JOHN GREY is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, Santa Fe Literary Review, and Lost Pilots. Latest books,” Between Two Fires”, “Covert” and “Memory Outside The Head” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the Seventh Quarry, La Presa and California Quarterly.