three poems
by William Taylor, Jr.
The People Who've Been to Hell and Back
The people who've been to hell and back,
you know it right away,
even if they're too polite
to talk about it.
You can hear it in their voices
and smell it on their jackets.
There’s a look in their eyes
that makes you nervous.
Get a few drinks in them
and they’ll loosen up a bit,
tell you
how Dante only saw the guest rooms
and never set foot in the
dirty parts of town.
The people who've been to hell and back
will not suffer bad poetry
or good intentions.
They have great fashion sense
and the best record collections.
They find the beauty and the terror
in all the places you never thought to look.
They'll tell you hell is just like
the most terrible things you've dreamed
only you don't wake up.
They can see all your secrets as if
they were branded in light
upon your skin.
They could tell you your fate
like a cheap vaudeville trick,
reveal your final destination
in great and unwarranted detail,
but by the time they got around to it
you’d be already there.
This Will Last Forever and Afterword Be Sold for Old Iron – Carl Sandburg
Now is not so different
from anytime.
People on the radio
still sing about love
like they did 100 years ago.
We occasionally are given to fire and rebellion
and still dream of being more than
these interchangeable days,
the red plastic party cup of my heart
still hungry for something new to break for.
Julia with her laughter
and her pretty nose.
Caught fast on the thorns
of the trap of the world,
we live in fear of the telephone
and the void,
surrounding ourselves with gentle things
like protection spells.
They say you’ll never escape the things you’re running from
and never catch the things you’re chasing,
and every song that fades into silence
plays on eternally in some far off place.
And August Comes Again to Break our Hearts
I’m having a beer at Murio’s
watching the street kids
and the tourists
and the beautiful people
drift along Haight Street
as they always have.
I find a comfort in this, marveling
at how anything manages to be
alive at all anymore, and why.
There’s reggae on the jukebox
but even this is not so bad,
because it still feels decent enough
to exist within the gentle absurdity
of a few moments absent
of the common horror
that dogs us unto death.
After this beer I will shop for records
and if lucky I’ll find a few good ones
and listen to them tonight
over more beer,
believing in beauty once again
for as long as the music lasts.
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 now available from Roadside Press.