Wild World (Out of Control!)

 

—Poetry by John Grey, Johnston, RI
—Photos Courtesy of Public Domain

 

 

WILD WORLD

It’s a wild world.
That’s what they tell me.
Now that the December winds
come calling,
lash the trees with sleet,
and rats race along the rooftops
looking for a way in
out of the cold,
and the temperature drops
like a dumbbell on a foot
while night burgles
the last of the outside light.
 
No time to be out in it, they warn.
The leaves are dead
and that’s just the start
with every ice-bound sidewalk
ready to pull itself out from under
any strays,
and the wild dogs loose
and hungry for flesh,
and the muggers out
for their last bloody haul
before the weather mugs them.

Stay inside with family, is their advice.
Light the fireplace,
roast chestnuts,
sing carols,
hug close,
feel cramped,
bring up old sores,
scrap and argue,
vent and sulk,
run outside in a furious huff
and slam the door behind you.

Then comes across them.
Listen just long enough
for them to tell me,
“It’s a wild world.”.

 

 

 

 

GOING BLIND

Everything you reach for
is elsewhere.

A shape is the best
former details can do.

People you knew by sight
become familiar voices.

You may warm to strangers
but they’ll never have a face.

 

 

 

 

TENTH BIRTHDAY PLUS ONE WEEK

You were barely ten
when you came across
that body in the river.

It was a young woman,
a heap of bone and flesh debris,
trapped between two rocks.

Her face was pale,
her throat, a tattoo circle
inked in moldy green skin.

A week from your tenth birthday,
and the belated gift to your head
was a corpse with long straggly hair.

No need to tear
the packaging to shreds,
its eyes were unwrapped already.

 

 

 

YOUR NIGHTTIME INDOCTRINATION

Your breasts’
breath hastens
to the prospect of eternal life.

Your body rolls over,
spills your throat uppermost,
like a guide-post
to secular heaven.

There is something
in your bedroom
that resists every definition
but pleasure.

It alights on your vein,
gives so much with its taking.

Your family finds you dead come morning.
But they just don't know where to look.

 

 

 

 

WHAT LIES AHEAD

I’m halfway up a hill
with you beside me
at the foot of the ruins
I saw so dead by day
yet now, with sun’s rays
poring through, alive
and I go on without pause
while you reluctantly follow.

I’m drawn to the crumbled walls,
the vine-strangled arch,
the very core of your unease.
I’m spellbound by shape and shadow,
while you feel as if something’s
watching us.

What you hear as a warning
to me is a beckoning.
What you fear threatens us,
I welcome as abstruse company.

My fervor is a quest for knowledge.
Your resistance is your unknowing.

 

 

 

 

FROM MY HOUSE BY THE SHORE

Every dusk,
through a cracked
second-floor window,
I watch this
woman in black
walk slowly along the shore,
then stop in the same place
every time,
to toss something
into the waters.

I feel for her.
I feel for what stresses
her so much
that she needs
to dispossess it.
I feel for the waters
who do not wish
for this nightly gift.
I fear for its return.
I fear for anything
whose fate is sealed
in cycles.

 

 

 

IN THE AFTERMATH

Sometime after the tornado hits,
the people show up on the sidewalk
to see what they have left of themselves:
to most, it’s everything,
to a few, it’s nothing.

The twister’s footprint
is both wide enough and not so wide.

An old house has found a new lot.
A tree is garbed
in a farmer’s best suit.

Yet some homes are so unscathed,
it’s like they gained a coat of fresh paint,
a new roof and windows.

Nobody knows why some were punished
and others weren’t.

Some good people lost so much.
Some unworthy ones could laugh
the whole thing off.

So, to these God-fearing people,
it had nothing to do with sin or virtue.
No, it wasn’t the Almighty’s wrath.
Nor a vision of the end.

And yet…and yet…
there were those flying cows.

____________________

Today’s LittleNip:

TO DEAR ADAM, LOVE EVE
—John Grey


I am having a rib removed.
I won't even be anesthetized.
And I will get that bloodstained bone
back to you.
I’ll deliver it in person
or send it by mail.
Thanks for the loan.
But no thanks for the implication.

_____________________

—Medusa, with thanks and welcome back to John Grey with his fine poems today! Our current Seed of the WEek is Out of Control, and these poems from John hit the nail right on the head...

 

 

 

 

For future poetry happenings in
Northern California and otherwheres,
click on
UPCOMING NORCAL EVENTS
(http://medusaskitchen.blogspot.com/p/wtf.html)
in the links at the top of this page—
and keep an eye on this link and on
the daily Kitchen for happenings
that might pop up
—or get changed!—
 during the week.

Photos in this column can be enlarged by
clicking on them once, then clicking on the x
in the top right corner to come back to Medusa.

Poets’ bios appear on their first MK visit.
To find previous posts, type the name
of the poet (or poem) into the little
beige box at the top left-hand side
of this column. See also
Medusa’s Rapsheet at the bottom
of the blue column on the right
side of this column to find
any date you want.

Miss a post?
You can find our most recent ones by
scrolling down under this daily one.
Or there's an "Older Posts" button
at the bottom of this column.
(Please excuse typos in older posts!
Blogspot has been through a lot of
incarnations in 20 years!)

Would you like to be a SnakePal?
Guidelines are at the top of this page
at the Placating the Gorgon link;
send poetry and/or photos and artwork
to kathykieth@hotmail.com. We post
work from all over the world—including
that which was previously published—
and collaborations are welcome.
Just remember:
the snakes of Medusa are always hungry—
for poetry, of course!