Poetry By William Taylor Jr.

        Andrew Seaman CC




I Wasn't Going to Drink Today

but I am 

because I started thinking about how 
we used to sit in your dark little attic of a room 
drinking those jugs of cheap red wine 

reading poems to each other while music 
played from your little radio 

and how our favorite Bukowski poem 
was “The Man with the Beautiful Eyes”

and the poem told about how beauty 
is never allowed to exist in the world
for very long because people are afraid of it

people are ashamed that they aren't 
beautiful themselves so they kill beauty 
the first chance they get.

It felt like the truest thing we'd ever heard
and we read it again and again
smoking and drinking and listening
to punk rock songs.

Now I'm thinking about how I haven't 
written a poem about you since your death
and it's coming up on three years now

and how when something beautiful 
dies the poets always scramble 
to be the first to cheapen it with words

they wear the death of beauty like a tinfoil badge
parading the streets with their phony crowing.

Me I knew I had no words that could stand 
unashamed in the face of it.

There's a photo of you shoved in a book 
somewhere on my shelves 

you're sixteen with a mohawk 
and a dress you wore for me.

I look for it now and then
rifling through the pages
of the likely volumes

Sartre, Salinger
The Works of Oscar Wilde.

I haven't seen it in years but I know it's there.

I'm on my third wine now and getting sentimental.

They tell you you shouldn't get sentimental when writing
poems about death.

They also tell you that a poem shouldn't be longer
than a single page if you want anyone to read it.

This is a sentimental poem longer than a single page
and I am not ashamed.

Sarah I can see your face and hear your voice
reading the end of that poem, those final lines 

about how nobody wanted anybody to be strong 
and beautiful, how others would never

allow it, and how many, many people 
would have to die.

​

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William Taylor Jr. lives and writes in San Francisco. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, and a volume of fiction. His work has been published widely in literary journals, including Rattle, The New York Quarterly, and The Chiron Review. He was a recipient of the 2013 Kathy Acker Award and edited Cocky Moon: Selected Poems of Jack Micheline (Zeitgeist Press, 2014). Pretty Things to Say, (Six Ft. Swells Press, 2020) is his latest collection of poetry. A new collection is forthcoming from Roadside Press.