WHEN I FINALLY LEFT HOME
It was two hours before
I returned home
to load up the rest of my stuff
into the back of the van.
It was three days before
I showed up
for a home-cooked dinner.
It was a week before
I struggled through
that familiar front door
with my laundry.
And three months before,
the big lie –
“My landlord promised my apartment
to his son and new daughter-in-law”
when the truth was,
I couldn’t hack it on my own.
It was two years before,
I really did leave home.
It was the first
but not the last time,
I said “Finally.”
BATTLE LINES
Your house abuts your neighbors’.
And they brawl incessantly,
in words and sometimes in deed.
Hands over ears don’t help.
Their hardness, their selfishness,
their cruelty towards each other,
penetrates everything in their way.
The husband beats his wife.
She thrashes the boy.
The boy screams at his sister.
The sister smashes things
against her bedroom wall.
You live alone in loneliness.
Their closeness chafes into rage.
They can't merely sob like you.
They all have to take life out on somebody.
The violence quietens down eventually.
Explosions retreat into shame.
You even hear some sighs of regret,
a hug here and there.
You don’t pity them.
You’re too busy pitying yourself.
You can’t remember the last time
you had someone to make up to.
LISTEN UP
We, always the lesser of the two in a relationship,
need a more explicit way to establish our equality
than a limp stance or an emaciated smile.
We, who live in a constant state of ambush,
or underfoot, or mostly outside looking in,
must find, within ourselves, louder voices,
stronger cuss words, eyes that bulge with anger
rather than the kind that retreat deep in their sockets.
I recommend doing this in front of a full-length mirror.
You’d be surprised how much you can terrify yourself.
AN OLD MAN’S LAST HIKE
How far I’ve come, the road beyond won’t tell me.
Up ahead, it’s more of a trail but, thankfully,
it winds its way through forests, to rivers
and the wide, clear lake they drain into.
It doesn’t even matter if I make it to the waters,
anyplace now, from the field of wildflowers
to the sturdy trunks of ancient trees,
is a place of comfort for old bodies.
My blood can spur on the new shoots,
my flesh, grow moss and mushrooms,
my bones, replenish the limestone hills,
my darkness, free the light.
MY PARENTS’ GRAVES
He’s buried in a small country graveyard,
his rough slab also interred
but in long grass not earth.
Her ashes lie
beneath a smooth slab of granite.
in a field that surrounds
a city crematorium.
His coffin,
her remains.
are a hundred miles apart.
She was fifty years a widow in life
and is still a widow in death.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly and Lost Pilots. His latest books, Between Two Fires, Covert and Memory Outside The Head are available through Amazon. He has writing upcoming in California Quarterly, Seventh Quarry, La Presa and Doubly Mad.
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