Make Room for Gloom

 

How can I turn my back on gloom?

It’s what got me here.

Forty years of joy would have me

grinning like a fool

if, that is, my heart didn’t crack

from the excitement.

Misery has kept my body functions in line,

has ensured calm blood,

kept these veins behind like a bad child in school,

while the rest of the world galloped on.

I write page after page

of murk and shadow,

despondency and darkness.

A happy man can barely lift a pen,

tap a word into a keyboard

that isn’t “wonderful”, “amazing”

or just plain “nice.”

I have to watch myself

in case I get too loved,

much admired,

overly celebrated.

What does it for me

is bare bulb, lonely, head bent,

depressed, repressed

and poetry.. .that most hangdog of the arts.

Despair invigorates the brain cells.

Dejection cheers the imagination.

One man’s suffering

is another man orgasm.

And I’m wretched enough to tell you so.

Eugene

 

What a funeral.

Has to be fifty cars at least.

Ironic that.

He never had much time for cars.

Drove a beat up Ford

going on twenty years old.

And just to the grocery store and back.

 

So why not a parade of artists instead,

a wobbly line of bohemians in berets

and second hand black sweaters,

each with easel under one arm,

canvas tight against the other,

brushes clenched in teeth.

 

Or a procession of nude models,

lusciously brown and pink and black

posing along the road from church to cemetery.

Or why not a string of the local dilettantes

who attend art openings for the wine and cheese and crackers.

Promise them more wine, more cheese and crackers

and they’ll come.

Or a march past of that crowd

with money in pocket, who bestowed themselves

on gallery after gallery, nodded in pleasure

at all of his work but didn’t buy one picture.

 

But no, it has to be cars.

Like it has to be a priest

and not an art historian.

And grave diggers

instead of protectors of the legacy.

And family fill the front rows,

not the people who knew him.

And eyes fill with tears

and not appreciation.

Bio: John Grey is an Australian born poet, US resident since late seventies. He works as financial systems analyst. Recently published in Slant, Briar Cliff Review and Albatross with work upcoming in Poetry East, Cape Rock and REAL.