Poetry by Gregory Smith

     Neal Wellons CC




BANDO!!! 


I’m listening to Bando Stone And The New World and reading a Donald Glover interview and he says really, I feel sorry for y’all, you really didn’t even get a chance to– and my phone battery dies and all I hear is green frogs thrumming in the woods and I see cigarette butts collected on a brick stoop that is older than I am, and more neglected than I neglect myself and Bando pulls back a palm frond and sees a world that never needed him while I can hardly unfog the mirror enough to shave, while I continue to drink paradise until my eyes become an ocean, while I insufflate enough tundra to turn my wine back into water, while I wonder in whose world will I finally be brave enough to be 
new?

​




On Perpetual Motion


Sobriety is filling the void, 
Then deciding not too anymore and
wishing you still could. 
Building sandcastles
Knowing the tide is coming
No matter what. 
You don’t know when but you know

The tide doesn’t stop for anyone this small.

The universe has mechanisms for this. 
The bump on the back of the toilet,
The baggy in the alleyway.
People throw bullets in the bushes all the time
And I’m a fine firing pin. 

Addiction is trading ecstasy for
A coke shovel on a NA keychain
Because the irony was too delicious
And being such a fucking hipster
I only kept using because I knew
It wasn’t cool anymore. 

I've seen myself in the mirror,
Sallowed and stretched thin,
And known that I wouldn’t trade everything
For the meth because I haven’t yet
But the digi is still calibrating
If I care enough not to later.

I tell my friends how much I love them
And count how many heartbeats
I wasted not on them. 

Yet I still miss it so much. 
The burn behind my eyes like a wildfire,

My mind spiraling skyward in the updraft. 
The closest I’ve ever been to heaven,
Feeling like I could punch the God that gave me 
This want square in the fucking jaw 
And stay standing. 
The bitter taste of the burnt hit when
Rushing in the bathroom,
My fumbling fingers rolling the piece. 
Scraping away tooth decay
With my thumbnail after every hit 
Because I care too much to die just yet
But crave the prophecy of it. 

Sobriety is waking up every morning
Looking at the burn scars on my arm
Like a constellation. 
Tracing the stars 
and piecing together the plot.

​



Get it? 
After C. Bain. 

The running joke of our family; 
I wish I had a memory I didn’t
have to repress.
Always the optimists, we nibble
the edges
of the past and call it suppertime. 

Floyd clobbered the Carolina’s
instead of us, 
and my father bladed the gaffers
tape 
off the windows a week later. 
At supper, his falling teeth
clattered 
onto his plate. While we are all still
alive, 
We pray thanks for intermittence. 

Life; a hurricane with bands of
sunlight and 
just enough to see what our hands
have done, 
planted tiny seeds of minor death
in the eyes 
of those we love. How dare we? 

Presuming to persevere, filling
friends empty vessels
while the ocean comes for us.
Truly, We have only
to do one thing; mourn the broken
and beloved
parts of us when the salt claws at
our throats.

​


​Gregory Smith (They/Them) is drinking wine right now. You can typically find them sharing kandi bracelets with Metalheads or backswinging at a warehouse rave. 

​They have been serving on staff at New Hampshires longest running poetry slam and open mic series, Slam Free Or Die in Manchester, New Hampshire since 2018. They also were chosen as Slam Free Or Die’s Indie Slam Champion and IWPS representative (in abstentia) in 2018. 

Their poetry has appeared in Bullshit Lit, The Peoples Book Volume 2, Verum Literary Journal, Rockview Reader, Rectangles, and on NHPR.com. Their debut full-length collection Profligate Angel is available from Game Over Books. They're an Aries and therefore are here to spit fire and truth, no matter the cost