three poems
by William Taylor Jr.
Because Nothing Can be Saved
Listen, nobody asked to be here, so
leave us alone as we drink our wine.
Leave us caught forever as we are
in the amber of a Sunday afternoon,
gazing out of tavern windows
onto Polk St. as if our lives
depended upon it.
We don't want to be saved
because nothing can be saved.
Sometimes we do our best
and when we don't, it’s
nobody’s business.
Let us dissolve into our silence
and fading memories
with our parking garage hearts
and our paper cup souls.
It's as free as we'll ever get.
Letters From the Dead
We are lonely and dying,
frightened and diseased,
perverse and insane
with our secret cruelties,
our self-disgust and our AI lovers,
but we keep to our schedules,
we smile at the grocery store
and pay our rent mostly on time.
We muddle through people and jobs
as if they weren’t destroying us,
we read letters from the dead
to remind us we were loved.
We debase ourselves before imagined gods
nobody really believes in
because it’s easier than the void
as we wait for Friday
or lunchtime
or the movie
to begin.
A Poem or Something
I like hanging out in North Beach
and finding a quiet place
to sit and drink
while pondering the world and maybe
wrestling a poem or something
from the sorry mess of it.
Sometimes it’s hard, mostly
because of the poets.
The poets are everywhere —
the bars and the cafes,
the liquor stores and the street corners.
And the poets like to talk.
Hardly anybody likes to talk
the way the North Beach poets like to talk,
which can be an issue
if you’re trying to write a poem.
I’m currently hiding in a wine bar that plays
heavy metal records at a loud volume.
The poets tend to stay away from here.
If I’m lucky I’ll have a bit of time before
one of them sees me though the window
and wants to buy me a beer or borrow 5 dollars,
time enough to scratch out a skeleton
of this thing that sits inside me
refusing me peace until I grant it
some semblance of a life outside.
I decide this will have to do for now.
I suck down my drink
and head back into the night,
in search of something I cannot name,
and some poets who will listen to me
talk about it.
Photo of William Taylor Jr.
BIO: William Taylor Jr. lives and writes in San Francisco. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, and a volume of fiction. His work has been published widely in literary journals, including Rattle, The New York Quarterly, and The Chiron Review. He was a recipient of the 2013 Kathy Acker Award, and edited Cocky Moon: Selected Poems of Jack Micheline (Zeitgeist Press, 2014). His new poetry collection, The People Are Like Wolves to Me, is forthcoming from Roadside Press.