Two poems by John Grey

Rite Of Passage

New to the city,
broke but too shame-faced
to wire home for money,
I strummed a few tunes
for coins at a local coffee house.
I crashed with my audience.
They figured you can trust
a guy with a six string
and a heart to match.
The kindness of strangers
came down to two male English majors,
a female lawyer wannabe
with a taste for my accent
and another male art student
with a penchant for splashing
bright colors on walls.
I hung out there till I found a job
cleaning dishes and a tiny room
on the top floor of a tenement
that looked out over alleys and dumpsters.
And with squalor came fitful sleep
thanks to a lumpy mattress,
sirens and screams half the night.
I was surviving,
thriving as my more romantic notions
would have it,
I was Dylan in the Village,
Hart Crane in London,
Hemingway in Paris...
now if only the heat worked.
Two kinds of deprivation I reckon;
the one you choose,
the one that chooses you.
Art has to hurt
and sometimes self-immolation must do
for real threats.
At night, more coffee houses, more strumming,
wearing my crummy digs like a badge.
In the daytime,
scribbling new songs in a notebook,
protesting wrongly arrested black kids,
listening to the bongo beaters in the park.
It sure beats working in the hardware store.
Pity about the health benefits.

Six months of this
and I'd lost twenty pounds,
broken two guitar strings
I couldn't afford to replace,
got high on second hand marijuana smoke,
was still washing dishes for a living,
and my apartment may as well have had
bars on the window,
to clarify my position as the prisoner within.
Now I was Edmond Dantes in the Chateau d'If,
Prometheus bound to a rock,
Napoleon on Elba.
My choice then was either
dream dead in New York City wasteland
or dream deferred under parent’s watchful eye.
I scrimped together bus fare and left,
arrived home twenty pounds lighter
and scratching my beard.
Mother hugged me.
Old man snarled, "I told you so."
Younger brother asked a thousand questions,
started making his own plans
So my younger brother's me a year ago.
And the old man could well be me,
twenty, thirty years past.
And I'm me at this very moment
wondering what the hell do I do with my life.
But my mother hugged me.
And she must have someone in her arms.





In Context

With our pry bars and hacksaws
and holsters loaded up with tools,
we patrol the hills, the valleys of wrecks,
to the sound of scurrying rats and mice,
and gulls scouring this ocean of rust.

We're gear heads, widget collectors,
who have come to reclaim
the likes of handles, cylinder heads,
air springs, speakers, hubcaps and hood ornaments.

These cars are bodiless graves.
The corpses smell of grease not rotting flesh.
And busted windshields, crushed driver side doors,
tell gory tales that we don't wish to hear
as we break off or unscrew our little treasures.

There are no mourners here to stop us.
No angels made of springs and airbags
begging us to respect the dead.

This could be the steering wheel
that crushed a chest, busted a heart.
But one more turn of the Phillips head,
one more jerk of the pliers...
how easily it comes out of the frame.

 Bio: John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in New Plains Review, South Carolina Review, Gargoyle and Silkworm work upcoming in Big Muddy Review, Main Street Rag and Spoon River Poetry Review.   ​

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