“HOME AT LAST” by John Grey

to a dark pleasure hole,
a kind of low mass,
labor-saving devices,
dismal yellow wallpaper –
no wonder a man drinks
from boiling hell,
a kitchen table will have to do,
a series of apposite deluding
sermons on the pleasures
of the self-
beliefs balance so precariously
and here’s me praising them,
refusing to leave the building,
as solitude stares out at the universe
and then some –
where the stars cheer
at whatever Duchamp is painting these days,
as booze reclaims its place in religion,
colorless morphine for the masses
turning the world away from me –
what is it like out there anyhow?
baritone voice through megaphone,
boutique balustrades, psychotic rainbows,
bums pissing in the gutter –
can’t clean myself up for
if I shave I leave blood in traces,
can’t ask the light::
causality has never been so clean-shaven –
heady days of the early nineties,
don’t wait for formal burial,
enlist in a war with even electric shavers
and foam licking bloody chins –
a laugh riot for all who believe
in the rotting worth of bodies.

—

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in
That, Muse, Poetry East and North Dakota Quarterly with work upcoming
in Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, Hawaii Review and the Dunes
Review.