SUN GOD
It’s twilight,
the sun slinking away
from all indifference,
but tomorrow, rising up
over the eye’s horizon,
as optimistic as ever.
Rita draws the blinds.
She wants no light
interfering with her misery.
Jean says she no longer will have
brightness in the house,
not with that first gray hair
glaring back at her
from the bathroom mirror.
Thankfully, winter has the sun
a its mercy.
No warmth like a dead warmth.
Leaves are brittle as nerves.
The lake is frozen.
Parents watch in horror of life itself.
Children are skating out to where
only they can die.
The priest is in his counting house
while, high above him,
the church steeple gooses
the encroaching bat-filled night.
He’s turned off the bells
because the neighbors complain.
He’d turn off God if he could.
There’s always the sun to worship.
BEFORE SEX, SEX LIFE
I knew a little of the science
and much of the snickering.
With sex, I could look into
my own mind as if peering through a keyhole.
There I was with the prettiest
girl in class, two of us
as dumb and cutesy as the characters
in the gross jokes
we boys cycled endlessly.
I learned more of the science,
dropped some of the snickering.
“Eggs and pollen and sperm,” our teacher repeated
like a mantra.
My mother handed me a book,
half ashamed for its content.
“This is very beautiful,” she said, unconvincingly.
I’d already nursed my healthy appetite
for the licentious in print
through some heavily underlined parts
of a borrowed “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”.
Ultimately, I had no heart for science,
no patience with smut.
I was writing poetry by this.
I was making eye-contact
with the pig-tailed object of my affection,
leaping ahead of myself like a hunter’s dog.
She was smiling at me.
I was having her naked
on a field of blessed, crackling bluebonnet petals.
I’d slip her my poem.
She could read what we had done
long before we did it.
FOR LIFE
Kid got poked in the eye with a stick at school.
Half blinded for life.
Everything back then was for life.
Bullies were for life.
Wimps were for life.
Jocks were for life.
Nerds were for life.
Every hurt was for life.
Every wound, every playground taunt,
was for life.
All we left behind in school
was the things we learned from teachers.
Why complicate a life sentence.
John Grey is an Australian born poet and U.S. resident since late seventies. John's recently published in The Connecticut Review, Georgetown Review and REAL with work upcoming in Poetry East, Cape Rock and The Pinch.