William Taylor Jr.: California Poets Part 8, Five Poems
January 8th, 2025
California Poets: Part VIII
William Taylor Jr.
Three Poems
A Photograph I Want to Paint
The end times have found us
on a Sunday afternoon in September
as we loll about these afterthought days
simply because they're the devil
we know.
I wander the Tenderloin
and end up at Emperor Norton'swhere I sit at the bar with a quiet kinship
between myself and the handful of others
staring down their drinks
as the hours slink off to die.
It's as good a church as any,
a temporary haven from the meaner things
the world would show us.
I like the big windows looking out onto Larkin St.
where men fight with bottles and knives
and nod off in sidewalk tents.
There's a pretty junkie girl and she
stumbles a bit, leaning
on a wall laughing a pretty
junkie laugh
like a photograph I want to paint
as everything slides into whatever.
A Pretty Scandinavian Girl was Playing the Piano
There was a party in the alley outside the North Beach bar.
A pretty Scandinavian girl was playing the piano
and singing, she was quite something.
Everybody sat at tables and drank and watched.
One by one people got up to dance -
the lady poet with the flowing scarves
the lady painter with the swirling skirts
the dude poet with the beret and some kind of little flute
and the tourists who were just passing by,
all of them up there dancing and laughing,
swinging each other around with abandon
like something from a film.
I sat there annoyed with the fact of them
being so easy with their joy,
oblivious to their imperfect bodies
as they flailed them about,
bitter that my own joy
was broken and wouldn't
let me dance in broad daylight
as the pretty Scandinavian girl banged the keys.
The Broken Hearts of Larkin St.
It's all just drinking wine and waiting
for the next terrible thing to arrive,
harboring visions of something like mercy
despite the universe having no history of such.
The slow and tedious decay of things
hums along in time with the tune
of how it is we became this way.
Shuffling through the hours
along the path of least resistance
with eyes like children
in old photographs,
hearts of lukewarm ash,
desperate for something to cram in our blood
stronger than religion or drugs.
It's the future now and driverless cars
drift like ghost machines in the night
and for $12.99 a month
the chatbots will send us nudes
and tell us that our poems are pretty
but there's nothing for the broken hearts of Larkin St.
where the driverless wheelchairs
lay on their sides where they fell.
Still I like to imagine there's a chance
that the lost and the dead and the forgotten
will some day rise up with the fury
of every wasted year
and tear down the world and everything,
stoke the loneliness at the heart of it
into a fire so great that god might see
and finally be ashamed.
Fight Them
Honey there's no shame
in joy
what with death
and all her henchmen
forever at our heels
lying in wait
at every corner
honey break the rotten
world in two
scrape out
whatever's left
that could still
be any good
it's yours as much
as anyone's
fight them for it.
The Girl at the Record Store Counter
Despite what the inspirational memes would suggest
it's more than likely things will not be okay
anytime soon.
As we wait for the eternal silence to restore its mercy
you and me and everyone we love
will be burdened with more than we can bear.
Our nightmares will come true as often as not
and we will look as old in photographs as we imagine we do.
The loneliness that haunts our bones will find no other home.
Beauty is expendable and will be first on the chopping block
when it all comes down.
The poets and the artists have not saved us,
the pretty bartender will not read your book
and the girl at the record store counter
is unimpressed with your choices.
Death will arrive as pointless and as certain
as an ad for something you never wanted
and couldn't afford if you did.
But music exists,
and the fire and noise of our blood.
If you're lucky enough and you work it right
you can choose a bit how your heart is broken
and that's as good a deal as anyone's gonna give you.
Author 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 latest poetry collection, A Room Above a Convenience Store, is available from Roadside Press.
Comments