Saturday, July 11, 2015

William Taylor Jr.- Three Poems


Like a Fire

I guess the best way to explain it
is to imagine the perfect and irrefutable
sorrow of the world
that lies at the core of everything,

and me digging for it
like some ragged prisoner
with a broken spoon.

Sorrow knows our names
and writes our dreams,
we've no reason
to seek it out,

and yet to somehow take it unawares,
to breach the very heart of it
and make its terrible secret
my own

is a dream that drags me onward.

See, sometimes
when I feel it in my veins
like a fire,

when I speak with its voice
and see with its eyes,

I know I am closer to something.



His Wound

She is his wound,
the one that didn't heal,
and now his life
just a series of days
that take him
further from her.
In the quiet hours
he dissolves himself
in whiskey, plays
old records and sings
his memories,
the only soft things
that remain.
He doesn’t sleep,
just drifts
in and out of dreams,
wandering his sorrow
in search of the place
where he once
was whole.



The Horn

The day isn't much,
another thing half-born
and destined for obscurity.

It's too hot.

The poems aren't coming
and the story just isn't
very good.

The sun gives in
and I just don't know
what to do with anything.

I almost wish
I were back at work,
where I don't have to
flail about so much
for purpose or direction.

I just screw the one thing
onto the other,

and move on to the next,
again and again.

The hours pass,
empty but without much
trouble,

and then the horn
eventually sounds,
telling me I'm done.



William Taylor Jr. lives and writes in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. His work has been published widely in journals across the globe, including The New York Quarterly, The Chiron Review, and Poesy. An Age of Monsters, his first book of fiction, was published by Epic Rites Press in 2011. The Blood of a Tourist (Sunnyoutside, 2014) is his latest collection of poetry. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee and was a recipient of the 2013 Acker Award.
 
 

No comments:

Post a Comment