Poetry by John Grey

THE STREET MUSICIAN’S PHILOSOPHY

Thirty years from now, what will it matter?
What goes wrong now will be forgotten then.
I’ll be dead, my guitar in a dumpster.

When you toss money in my cap,  
you’re funding a stranger’s problems.
Not the music. You barely listen to what

I’m strumming and singing. My body
needs sustenance to keep from breaking down.
Your spare change ends up in the pocket of some pusher.

But I’m not complaining.  A boyhood dream 
warms itself by a grownup nightmare. I can
call myself a musician. Addict is another’s word.

And thirty years from now, I’ll be as forgotten
as the ones that got clean, who had no music in them.
So nothing matters. But its generosity is always welcome.


PARENTS

She looks up from time to time,
as if to penetrate the ceiling,
to get at the room 
where she spent ten years
nursing a dying father.

It's over now
but her stress doesn't think so.
Not while her mother’s
fragile drifting speech,
wrinkled eyes,
fall far short of knowing anyone.

These are the only parents
she will ever have –
the father of her nose,
the mother of her mouth, 
one passed on from life, 
the other from identity.

She once was their daughter.
There’s no name for what she is now.