The
Next Thing
At
this point I can't begin
to guess what might be
left of me.
Sometimes you lose the rhythm
of things,
the music goes funny
and the sky forgets your name.
I
just know the demons
aren't going anywhere anytime
soon,
so I drink with them on Sunday afternoons,
trying to negotiate some kind
of
workable deal,
while down in the alley
a withered woman begs
quarters
from confused tourists.
She's
having a bad time of it
as the girls stand outside
the nudie bars,
half naked and smoking,
as beautiful and as mean
as the sun.
I
watch them as the pretty waitress
brings my medicine
and think about how I'll
have to go back to work
tomorrow,
hungover
and with little sleep,
and how the waitress
and the girls outside the
clubs
one day won't be pretty,
or even alive,
and I'm feeling kind of sad
for everything
and how there's nothing to be
done
for any of it,
as we all go about our
business,
waiting for the next thing
to break.
What the Fear Tells Me
The great animal fear of the world
is what stays with us,
is what our bones are made of.
Love burns off in the sun,
strength gives way,
anything you can name
slips through your shaking hands.
The fear sleeps, but it's never
far
from the surface of things.
Those who say otherwise
are liars and always running.
God's an empty bottle
in the face of it,
whatever you've constructed
to keep it at bay
gives like splintered wood.
It's a fine afternoon;
there's wine and sunlight,
pretty girls beneath it.
But the fear is there in every
shadow.
I drink beer to try and keep it quiet,
offer these words
as a kind of appeasement,
but it's in me like a heart.
I dearly want to call
and tell you this,
because I think you'd
understand,
but the fear tells me
you won't pick up,
and it's probably right;
just like when says
I should have listened to my
father,
and how I'll never find
a good ending
for this poem.
All That Fire
Eventually you end up
wherever it
is
that trouble
leaves you,
caught like
a wounded thing
between all
the days behind you
and those
still to come
with
nothing much
to say for
yourself.
But that
girl,
she really
knew
how to
burn.
The thought of her caught
forever in
those flames
she wore
like skin,
and
laughing
the way she
did,
its the
kind of beauty
that leaves
scars
in secret
places;
the kind of
beauty that breaks you
in ways you
didn't know
you could
break.
And while even people like yourself
eventually
do their best
to forget
and move on,
her ghost
still burns
in dreams
and the spaces
between
things,
and the world is just the ash.
William Taylor Jr.
940 Post St. # 1
San Francisco, CA 94109
William Taylor Jr. lives and writes in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. His work has been published widely in journals across the globe, including The New York Quarterly, The Chiron Review, and Poesy. An Age of Monsters, his first book of fiction, was published by Epic Rites Press in 2011. The Blood of a Tourist (Sunnyoutside, 2014) is his latest collection of poetry. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee and was a recipient of the 2013 Acker Award.
