John Grey Sober At The Jukebox, Wary Of The Dear John Letter, And The White Man's Blues

THE DESIGNATED DRIVER

I'm drinking in a pathetic way

My fingers take up the task.

They drum on the table.

A friend jokes, "How's the Sarsaparilla?"

Actually, it's flat cola.

I'm the designated driver.

My thirst has been elected.

It must stay away from quenching

while my companions

double down on their happiness

with every sip of ale.

Tumblers of the stuff arrive,

froth enough to give birth

to Venus on the half-shell.

The beer glows melted gold.

The table rocks with filthy jokes.

Only I know they're not funny.

Jukebox blares and the singing commences.

Raucous bellows compete with booming beats.

Harmonics take a beating.

Melody tanks.

My ears are sorry

they were ever volunteered.

My buddies flirt. They roar.

They argue loudly but nothing comes to fisticuffs.

Mostly they're out of it.

Some collapsed across the table.

Others taking S curves to the men's room..

It's up to me to tell them

what a good time they're having.

Eventually, the bar closes

and my amateur, unpaid taxi

drops them at their house, one by one.

When I'm done,

I really do need a drink.

Out comes the whiskey bottle.

Click goes the glass.

I'm the designated driver

who drives himself to drink.

LOOKING IN ON THE AUTHOR

She wrote ferociously with one hand

while the other tapped slowly, softly, on the desk.

And then her pen slowed

as the tapping sharply increased velocity,

became almost violent as it thumped

relentlessly into the wood.

Finally, she began to write at a moderate pace,

and tamped the tapping to an equal speed.

Her creation, her fingertips, in perfect equilibrium, 

gave “Dear John” all of the kiss-off he could handle,

all of the kiss-off he deserved.

 BIT BY THE BLUES BUG

He was a white American boy

with one incessant problem.

He wasn’t a black American boy.

No, not the poor kid

dodging bullets on his way home from school

in some inner-city ghetto.

But the stylish, dazzling kind

he heard on the radio,

saw, now and then, on television,

when the Southern censors allowed.

He was troubled by his own skin.

Not because it paved the way or anything.

But, when he picked up his guitar,

the shade of his hands

didn’t go with the chords he played,

And when he opened his mouth,

the tonsils gushed sweet as a soda fountain,

not rough and lived in.

No grit in the tongue. No blood in the notes.

Not even when the tune dropped

from major into the 7th.

Just a vapid imitation of a standard blues progression.

He was a white American boy

obsessed with what he wasn’t.

He tried writing songs.

They came out like the Archies not Muddy Waters.

He even made some black friends.

They thought the Blues were a corny as Fat Albert.

They remained friends however.

And he became a white American man eventually.

Accepted what came with it.

Not privilege exactly.

But a willingness to leave his guitar

shuttered in its case for months on end.

When he did bring it out,

it reminded him how dumb he must have been

to want to be some old black bluesman

with the world on his shoulders

and the sound to prove it.

Instead, he picked out some of the latest pop songs.

Sang along to who he had always been.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in

That, Dunes Review, Poetry East and North Dakota Quarterly with work

upcoming in Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, Thin Air, Dalhousie

Review and failbetter.