Poetry

On the patio
recent grads
talk disappointing
jobs. The guy
explains he would
have been a firefighter
but for
the car accidents.
90 percent of the job
is car accidents,
he says, triage,
when he finds
the word.
He’s thought about
explaining this before
but never found
the opportunity
until now.
He shifts the topic,
to customer service.
He works in a hotel,
like me,
and now we’re brothers,
this man I’ve
never met
and judge through pen –
idle dreamers,
talkers.
He is my past
and I am his future.

Rain. The homeless man
in an orange beanie
follows another man
to the gas station
across the glossed street,
asks for money. The man
presumably says no, rubs
the homeless man’s beanie,
heads inside. The homeless,
resigned and ignored, plops
his pack next to a trash can
and sits, the night an empty
comfort until the other man
walks out, six pack in hand,
and gives it to the incredulous
hobo, shakes his hand,
wishes him well –
gifts him a night
washed in drunken oblivion
instead of damp shivered sobriety.

To the new streets
of foggy mountain
foreign nowhere,
the same as the familiar
ones I’ve left before.

To this plastic heart
lost in the back-alley
storefronts of places
I’ve already been
to somewhere else.

To the muddy
Appalachian Spring,
washed orange in the filth
of the lives I’ve left
behind, the earth stained
brown, and I am again
washed anew.

The good poem
is a false movement
in the corners of
our eyes, a predator
our predator eyes
can’t quite detect.

It is a voice
that won’t stop talking
when we’re trying
to focus on what
we think
is the truth.

It is a star
we’ll never see
and as soon as
it’s written it’s
gone someplace else.