James Babbs- Three Poems

James Babbs continues to live and write from the same small Illinois town where he grew up.  He has published hundreds of poems over the past thirty years and, recently, a few short stories.  James is the author of Disturbing The Light(2013) & The Weight of Invisible Things(2013).

Talking to the Dead

tonight

I’m pouring the whiskey

getting good and drunk again

and I’m talking to the dead

across the silence of this room

but the dead never answer me

maybe

they can’t hear me

are they even listening to me

and where are the dead tonight

are they floating between the stars

or are they buried in the ground

rotting silently in their graves

we have all of these notions about

where the dead must go

and what happens to them

when they’re no longer the living

maybe

they still walk among us

somewhere

just beyond our reach

or maybe

they merely fade into flickering

the soft light of memory

I don’t know

I wish I had the answers

and I’m not sure

what I can tell you

I don’t know

I don’t know what I believe

In the Distance the Silence Is Deafening

why should I take the time to

describe the room where I’m sitting

nobody cares about this room and

nobody gives a damn

about the moon and the stars

or how the light falls across

the pages of my notebook

poetry doesn’t mater and

people all over the world are perfectly content

living without the knowledge of books

none of them will ever read my words

nor will they ever miss them

because

they know poetry doesn’t really matter

when children are starving in Washington and

we have people dying on the streets of NYC

and all over America people without jobs

spend part of their days looking for work

while other people down on their luck

hang out in the bars

waiting for another drink and

I know poetry doesn’t matter

but I keep writing it anyway

it doesn’t really matter

in much the same way

we can all exist without love and

every day I continue

practicing my dying art

sitting here at this gray metal desk

surrounded by shelves full of books

listening for the sound of something

too far away for me to hear

No Magic Here

remember

no matter what happens

there’s no magic here

but sometimes

you find some luck and

it gets you through the day

cars out on the road

full of people going nowhere and

all the years gone

but I still feel the same

existing

along the edges of things and

never moving any closer

toward the inside

what happened to the warm days

what happened to my youth

remember

there doesn’t have to be

a reason for anything and

everything keeps going

whether we want it to or not

nothing lasts forever and

remember

nobody really cares about

anything but themselves

one day

even these words will disappear