Today, you’re looking at your hands.

You’re thinking time has made a mistake

and those palms are far too rough and course

for someone your age.

Yet you remember the uncle

who fell and never got back up.

That’s not you.

At least, not yet.

You’re always fending off an attack, you say.

Or are in need of hammer and nails.

There’s work to be done –

on a bookcase

and maybe even on your frontal lobes.

You do your share of pacing.

You’ve had it with people who are

always threatening to shoot.

You’re concerned by all the books you’re not reading.

And your job – what you call shoveling shit.

Yesterday, a friend took sick.

He’ll be in hospital for a month.

You don’t care much for your neighbors

but you respect their differences.

You miss your wife.

And your sanity is not fully engaged

with what’s happening in your head.

You prefer your dark room of sleep

to most company.

And you see the Earth as an ark,

floating through space,

constantly ditching the ones

who can no longer pay their way.

You stand in the doorway,

feel the draft of the world’s grief.

And yet there’s still

this small persistent heat.

John Grey

(Image by CJA)

The boy is learning

what to do

with his own tiny steps.

Beyond diapers

and breast-feeding,

he’s onto the good stuff,

knocking a glass

from the coffee table,

getting his fingers caught

in doors of cabinets,

toppling and

landing on his jelly bones.

He’s putting stuff

in his mouth.

He’s touching

what is there to feel.

He’s embracing a teddy.

He’s tossing it

out of the crib.

He’s trying out

his knees, his elbows,

his arms, his legs.

He even bleeds a little

now and then.

Or runs into a wall.

And he cries –

why not-

his voice must be there

for some reason –

hungry, thirsty,

hot, cold,

or simply bored –

they’re all an excuse

for sound.

And so it’s

push, pull, reach, fall, rise –

it’s choreography for little people.

John Grey

(Today we welcome back poet John Grey. Get used to seeing him over the next four days!–The Eds.)

From a gray and restless sky,

the snow comes down like a verdict.

Guilty, it says.

And the cold is ten degrees below mercy.

A leaf is torn apart, as is my face.

The wind makes no distinction

between what belongs and what’s been cast out.

Swirling drifts erase birds from the sky’s memory.

Shards of ice collide.

They pull me into their quarrel.

Am I, like them, a fragment blown off course.

A stray cat wails from the pain of exposure.

A rabbit disappears into the earth before night can claim it.

A mouse finds entry in wall

sealed tight against the likes of us.

Somewhere, I tell myself, a fire still burns for me.

And a woman waits with an embrace warm enough to unmake winter.

But that is a country I can no longer reach.

For now I walk the frozen floorboards of this weather,

unable to think of anyone else’s suffering,

not with all this needling, this stabbing,

this piercing reminder of where I cannot ever be.

Tonight, it’s my turn.

I’m the one

who needs dragging in from the streets.

John Grey