| THE BLACKOUT For an entire day, no electricity. My house is a graveyard of appliances: dead computer, microwave (heart attack was it), television six feet under, worms devouring, not only its innards, but all of today’s scheduled programming. Sky too gray to crack open a book. Body too restless to sit in a parlor chair and meditate. Wind’s blowing a frenzy outside. I’ve no wish to be decapitated by a tomahawking tree branch. Staring out the window is amusing for a minute or too but then it’s back to… what is it back to? I can put into words everything but doing nothing. My wife is spread-eagled on the couch with her eyes closed. She’s not sleeping exactly but not truly awake either. She’s like a house without power. No lights, no whirring, no “you have mail”, just some shuffling here and there. I sit beside her, kiss her on the forehead. It’s 10A.M. Not the hour of passion’s cue. It’s my latest self-realization. I’m not independent after all. I’m wired to the grid. A break anywhere along the line and I’m just one more juiceless device. Eventually, the power returns. So that’s what I am.. .an eventuality. | DISTURBANCE Gods bark at one a.m. Nothing out there. No reason I can see for supreme beings to get riled up, with gold eyes blazing, and hair raised to the skies. But they suspect that another religion has intruded on their space, with its own priests and holy books and followers. Maybe a drunk spooked them. Or a comet. Or the lights of a passing truck. Or a secular racoon trotted across a driveway, Their omnipotent minds can fashion a threatening monster from the merest of sounds. So they bark all night but I fall asleep anyhow. A modicum of mood, a smidgen of stress, my dreams are the work of gods. SUNLIGHT EMPORIUM Above – glorious – serene blue, Yet I got careless with it, closed my eyes, knocked on a cloud to be let in. Race with the heart and roam about endlessly between real people and their fading photographs, and children with orange horizon grins. . Back before lightning, there was nothing to see. Churches built themselves anyhow. God was a telegraph pole. Crows stood in for angels. Skin and eyes and body defined you for the rest of your life. The soul was as worthless as a gravestone. Gold and black butterfly on a twig, it flutters and yet stays alert, haunted by the shadows of passing men, its sea of tranquility half-buried in my afternoon sketches of the afterlife, that high-gloss veneer that sets off sparkles in my green plaza at sunset. The sun says it’s holding some fire in reserve for me but I don’t believe a word it says. For all its life-giving properties, the sun is nothing special. Sure, it gives mother earth her fix. But it’s mostly for the amusement of those who bother to look up. |
| THE FOX INTRUDES Some distinguished looking canines here; you’re wondering, are any of these creatures foxes – small talk breaks up into rear-end sniffing, but who is lurking, who’s elusive, who rates superior to all this furry gnashing, as a privilege of its inner foxfire. Can this poodle shapeshift? Does the sheepdog use its belly as a drum? And how many lapdogs does it take to pounce on a prey, kill and devour it? Only Reynard upsets the order of things with a fake bleat and then an avaricious leap. The yapping is incessant. Some of them are more pet than they are dog. A rabbit could eat off their noses and live between their teeth. Hors d’oeuvres are being passed around – watch the most practiced paw, the one that can grab and swallow without letting another dog’s face rise again… years beyond when it drops. | FISH BOWL From deep within the fish bowl, something orange with black stripes, silently gestures. A bare bulb above shines down on my curiosity, a tiger’s slow pacing. Everything else in the house is what it should be acting like it must. Spiders creep. Ants march. Moths play with light and dark. Then the tiger roars and floor and ceiling, struggle to hold their place. The table that holds the fish bowl rocks, the castle within tumbles. Life at fishbowl’s edge is communication’s last stand. The graceful feline wishes to be fed. It has me at the crossroads. I could be meal or master. |
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Grey is an Australian poet and 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. Upcoming in California Quarterly, Seventh Quarry, La Presa and Doubly Mad.
About the Author
