Wednesday, January 8, 2020

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.