A Man Returns to the Scene of Where it Happened / The Walls Speak by John Grey

 A Man Returns to the Scene of Where it Happened

A scream. 

He must have heard it.

Waves of anguish ripple through

a sky hemorrhaging orange. 

 

He, mouth gritted, 

clasps hands around

an invisible throat.

 

She is unseen but felt,

a roar in the wind, 

a shudder in the boards 

beneath his feet.

 

Does the scream fade?

Or echo endlessly going forward?

 

The bridge snaps

like the bones of a neck.

with or without his footsteps.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Walls Speak

 

The walls make noise.

It’s not mice.

Since when do those creatures

whisper in perfect English?

And I’ve never come across 

a rodent yet

that spoke to me by name.

 

Mere rustling 

wouldn’t bother me.

Nor the occasional scamper

across the kitchen floor

in search of crumbs.

I can lay traps.

I can bait the nooks with poison.

 

But how do you trap the past?

How do you poison a memory?

When it’s the past that traps me?

And my memory is poison?

 

The walls keep repeating,

“I can’t forgive what you have done to me.”

They’re not referring to the cheap wall-paper.

More likely the bloodstains 

that pattern is pasted over.

 

 

 

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Shift, River And South and Flights. Latest books, “Bittersweet”, “Subject Matters” and “Between Two Fires” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Rush, Spotlong Review and Trampoline.

My Graveyard Confession / Enough of These Visitations, Already by John Grey

My Graveyard Confession

I confessed my love
to Anna's pale fearful face
in that same secluded eerie spot
where Jamie Harryman
butchered Lisa Winters
with a steak knife,
confessed my love
to the relentless hum
of Jamie's savage blade
through graveyard air,
the screeching echo of
Lisa's tombstone screams.
"Love you too,"
whispered a trembling Anna.
"Now let's get out of here."
Nothing like young love...
except, of course, for old murders.




Enough of These Visitations, Already

All I have to ask of you
is that you go back
the way you came –
through the wall,
to the graveyard,
the soil, the coffin,
and stay there.

No more shrieks,
no more flailing arms,
no more tumbling backward
into a heap on the floor.

You died once.
I killed you once.
We’re even.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly and Lost Pilots. Latest books, ”Between Two Fires”, “Covert” and  “Memory Outside The Head” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in California Quarterly, Seventh Quarry, La Presa and Doubly Mad.

My Visitor / The Dead Woman in The Chair by John Grey

My Visitor

In hoping for a life restored,
I look upon
a wisp of the impossible.

In midnight silence,
what I see is what I cannot have.

A ghost appears
at the end of the bed
and is yearning to be true.

It tries to come toward me
and I reach out to it
but outstretched arms lead nowhere.

Around me,
reality takes to the shadows.

Its replacement is visible
but of no use.




The Dead Woman in The Chair

Yours is the silent repetition
of death.

You sit upright in a chair
with my voice in one ear
and an angel’s in the other.

I beg you stay.
He pleads for you
to take his hand,
fly off with him.

Suddenly.
your head flops down

It’s a yes
but it’s not aimed
at anybody.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Sheepshead Review, Stand, Poetry Salzburg Review and Hollins Critic. Latest books, “Leaves On Pages” “Memory Outside The Head” and “Guest Of Myself” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Ellipsis, Blueline and International Poetry Review.

A Village Off the Beaten Track / One of Those Nights by John Grey

A Village Off the Beaten Track

The floods, the heat,
the winds, even the vandals,
have worn away the statue
over time.

He is no longer
the grinning devil of all fears

but a one-horned, nose-less,
one-armed, one-and-a-half-lipped
object of derision.

Once, in this village,
evil was set in stone.

Now it’s up to the people.



One of Those Nights

What kind of night is this.
It’s cloudless but there’s no moon.
The phone is silent.
There is no love.

I’m sitting in the dark alone.
A lamp, a bulb,
light is available
but would just be wasted on me.

A spider crawls across my skull.
An ear-wig haunts the right canal.
A rat has my cat in its mouth,
drops it at my feet.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Sheepshead Review, Stand, Poetry Salzburg Review and Hollins Critic. Latest books, “Leaves On Pages” “Memory Outside The Head” and “Guest Of Myself” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Ellipsis, Blueline and International Poetry Review.

Last Days in a Hotel Room / The Ghosts of Fall by John Grey

Last Days in a Hotel Room

I’m alone in a hotel room
with peeling wallpaper,
a seascape print,
little bits of soap
and a half-used shampoo bottle.

Did I mention peeling skin,
a print of Goya's
“Saturn Devouring His Son”
little bits of human liver
and a half-drunk flask of arsenic.

Or peeling facade,
an x-ray of my cancerous insides,
and a half-used,
no, a little-used right kidney.

I'm looking at the clock
to see how much time I've got
until checkout.
And I'm listening to my heart
in case I'm just imagining
that clock.



The Ghosts of Fall

We are the ghosts of falling leaves,
taking our shape from the downward drift
of mottled, crisp and crackly death,
crunching noiselessly on those already fallen,

Cloistered away from the invidious heat of secular summer,
we emerge in Fall, in air more to our ephemeral liking,
The sky is almost as pale as our skin.
We’re emboldened by the long bitter nights.

We blow against your windows.
Press fog-like faces deep into the glass.
We are contagion fresh from the chill of hell.
Without fingers trembling, knees knocking,
you cannot accommodate our presence.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Sheepshead Review, Poetry Salzburg Review and Hollins Critic. Latest books, “Leaves On Pages” and “Memory Outside The Head” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Lana Turner and International Poetry Review.

March Night by John Grey

Awake in cold dark,
wet wind hammering the window,
sheets in disarray,
curtain in tremors.
Walls feel thin as my skin.
Night is raw.
Why sleep?
Even the sun in dreams
sinks before the glistening
chill of ghosts.

The dregs of February
keep the blood from business,
these corpuscles mere shills
for the brumal carnival.

So March shakes off winter's starkness,
for its own belligerence, damp and blustering,
the bitterest cold, not out there
somewhere in the depths of snow,
but blowing homeward.

Sure, it's April soon,
winter's death is assured,
but I shiver through the ice tears of its mourners.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Orbis, Dalhousie Review and the Round Table. Latest books, “Leaves On Pages” and “Memory Outside The Head” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Lana Turner and Hollins Critic.

The Quiet Life by John Grey

Oh for some peace and quiet,

without vampires tapping

on my window at night,

or werewolves roaming

in the woods

that rim my house.

 

I could get some sleep

if it weren’t

for reanimated beings

constructed from corpses

pounding on my front door.

 

And be indulged

by pleasant dreams

if I didn’t suffer through

the usual nightmares

of mummies brought to life,

Jack the Ripper

emerging from the shadows

and headless ghosts

slipping into bed beside me.

 

Yes, how blissful my life would be

if it only were reality.

 

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Soundings East, Dalhousie Review and Connecticut River Review. Latest book, “Leaves On Pages” is available through Amazon.

 

Last Breath by John Grey

Her breath

died like the wind,

one moment blowing,

the next totally still –

no, more like a joke,

a burst of laughter,

then silence,

when the joke

didn’t seem so funny

after all -

no, like people

at an airport,

one leaving,

the rest staying –

no, make that

one staying behind,

the rest moving on

like the wind.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in Hawaii Pacific Review, Dalhousie Review and Qwerty with work upcoming in Blueline, Willard and Maple and Clade Song.

In a Motel Room in New Mexico by John Grey

Men and women

cluster about, all in dark robes,

the ones that gather automatically

when there's been some kind

of unrest in the realm of the spirit.

Hands reach into you,

grasp bloody and raw.

They get the pain out of the way

so the trembling can begin.

You see the blade

like a grinning star in the heavens,

the foil of the one the shepherds saw.

Cut away from you,

the child is passed

from hand to hand,

interrogated with a knowing glance.

Everyone but you

can hold the newcomer

to their dark chest.

These are doctors, nurses.

You are a new mother.

He is a baby, red-faced and hungry.

Shame about the horns.

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.

It Takes All Kinds by John Grey

There is an expert on everything
and somebody who loves them.

Her husband's a ghoul,
knows human flesh,
its tastiest parts,
its after-death sumptuousness,
its finger-licking good diseases.

He talks cemeteries
and shovels,
has a sixth sense,
can assess the freshness of a corpse
from one sniff of the dirt
it's buried beneath.

She's a little repulsed
by his habits
but she knew what she was getting into
when he first dug her up.

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.

There's a Woman in the Room by John Grey

She shines as if she’s floated down

from the twinkling villa windows,

as if she were a tidbit from the stars,

as if she swam between tufts of cloud

and through the tree-tops,

becoming less thin and distant,

less a vapor with each hungry mile.

I remember how when, as a little boy,

startled by a bad dream,

I'd open my eyes upon the midnight landscape,

stare frightened into the nothingness,

until trembling and breathing hard,

my fingers would grip tight against the pillow,

pull the room out of the blackness

back to me, tile by tile, brass gas jet

by dresser photograph,

until my night vision saluted

what I expected to be there

But now, as an older, wiser man,

a brief interlude

with the unfamiliar

is more opportunity than demon,

more wish-fulfillment than dread.

What’s it matter

that my senses have no role to play

on what I’m seeing and feeling.

There’s a woman in the room.

Once she would have terrified.

Now I am expecting her.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in the Homestead Review, Harpur Palate and Columbia Review with work upcoming in the Roanoke Review, the Hawaii Review and North Dakota Quarterly.  

Uncovering the Old Grave Site by John Grey

Smothered by weeds, a rough cut of stone,

chiseled with graffiti, in this case, 

the name, Elijah Forrester, the years he lived,

and the epithet, “Soul In Heaven.”

Chiseled to annoy death no doubt

so why is it life that sprouts so irreverently,

obscures the words, sends even the facts of him

to a kind of grave?

I pull away the most clinging 

though their roots burrow deep, 

reveal his details for the light.

This is all selfish on my part.

I want someone to part the weeds, 

expose the life, when I’m gone.

It won’t be me. 

Somebody called Elijah Forrester 

makes that plain.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in the Homestead Review, Poetry East and Columbia Review with work upcoming in Harpur Palate, the Hawaii Review and Visions International.

Presence by John Grey

She’s this presence in your life,

under the bedsheets,

curled up on the couch,

occupying your reflection

in the mirror,

or slicing her finger, dripping blood,

on a kitchen counter-top.

She flickers in the windowpanes.

She steams out of the bathwater.

Every photo in the house

is in her image

or someone very much like her.

She doesn’t speak to you.

In fact,

she’s not even aware of your presence.

She lives alone in this old Victorian.

Your haunting’s just not going over.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in Nebo, Euphony and Columbia Review with work upcoming in Leading Edge, Poetry East and Midwest Quarterly. 

The Widower / What's Coming by John Grey

THE WIDOWER

The house is old and rambling.
Rooms beget rooms like facing mirrors.
Only one is occupied.
On the four-poster bed,
body struggles with thought
for the right to the subconscious.

Guilt won't leave well enough alone.
It locks you in a room,
shrieks back the pain
into the heart, the hands,
of their maker.

You crave a sleep, distant in time and place
from the worst of you.
Night is frozen into stillness, quiet,
but for a shiver of curtain, a creeping spider,
the rocking of a pendulum, radiator hiccup,
the creak of footsteps on the attic stairs.

WHAT'S COMING

Such a wind defiler,
a tree killer,
a cracker of the earth
like it's nothing but a walnut -
nothing is sacred.
What is a soul to you
but a spirit to be shredded.

It's cold out.
Dark clouds overlay the air.
Snow falls -
under your instructions no doubt.
I light the fire in my cottage.
Flames commune,
whisper of your coming.

You're as dead as brown grass
but no disguising the murmur.
You're ten thousand times crone-old
but the ache, the infirmity, is all mine.

Who dug you up this time?
Who set you free?
My face is all crusted sores,
nerves jiggle like skeletons,
heart's throb is down to a nibble,
thoughts bow and scrape like a serf.

You don't even have to appear.
Or even exist.
You're on your way
and that's much too much for me.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in Examined Life Journal, Studio One and Columbia Review with work upcoming in Leading Edge, Poetry East and Midwest Quarterly.