No Highway
May as well put your thumb away for the next ten thousand years.
Hitchhiking is now this dinosaur from the fifties, sixties and seventies.
It wasn't a meteor that took it out but too many news stories
about what can happen when you give a stranger a ride.
Now, if you want to go someplace, you can't rely
on the kindness of people you don't know.
Just try it. Standing on the side of the road
will turn you into a rapist, a serial killer even, before you know it.
Just think about that when you're breathing in all that smoke and dust.
Your hair is still as long as it was then, still tied in that pony-tail
but now it's as gray as the weather in these parts.
And you don't dress any different, except for weddings and funerals.
Jeans are like habit, both as in nuns and in clicking your teeth.
And that new flannel shirt is a descendant of every one you ever wore.
But you were there, bedside, for the slow death of trust.
You remember how the two hour waits turned into three and then four.
There was even a whole day when absolutely no one stopped.
That's when you knew you had a corpse on your hand.
Call it hitchhiking - call it the road -
you've been a line item in an obituary ever since.
Somedays, you look at that thumb with a sense of sorrow,
like it's more than just the first digit of the hand,
capable of opposition and apposition.
It's a ticket to a way of life.
And the ticket's expired. So is the way of life.
On a Brief Visit to My Home Town
The road, at least,
follows the old patterns
though most of its traffic
has been siphoned off
by new highways.
I have come here to walk
the streets of that parallel city
from my youth
But, atop the hill,
new mall construction
masks the site of
the old bowling alley.
Rainbow colors
swarm the entrance
Inside
chain stores, food courts,
want at my wallet.
I know,
from a photo album,
the lanes
and the girl about
to swing her arm back
and then under
as she waltzes just short
of the foul line.
I know from a photo album
what I don't know
from any place else.
Stella Runs into the Baby's Father at a Wedding
They're actors frozen in tepid applause,
the butcher's son with an ear like a club steak,
the former debutante,
outraged mixture of slow anguish and bottled fury
yet building a nest for her pink shivering offspring.
He's making a hard case for having no interest,
nibbling on canapes like bees on flowers,
giving her the onceover through twelve months of amnesia.
A tray passes under her nose.
She wishes it was a trap door.
Survive first, that's her motto.
Forgive yourself later.
His thick eyebrows graze on one another
like mating snails.
She chokes on what she ever saw in him.
He stares right in her eyes.
She refuses to blush.
She knows she's not at her best.
Her hair feels like steel wool.
His hair is fine. But just look at him,
lusting after every woman's vital organs.
Her resurrection has not been so cheap.
Once, his very name held her hostage.
Now she holds her breath,
impersonates someone who could care less
that she's no longer within his reach, his want.
He hasn't changed,
still infatuated with booze and virgins.
What if she told the world he was the father?
Such an answerable question
at this beer-soaked wedding party.
So she leaves early, one last glance at him
of garbled hate that drops the gauze of politeness.
She'd rather be home with the baby,
where the love is less juvenile
and the secrets are easier to keep.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in New Plains Review, South Carolina Review, Gargoyle and Big Muddy Review with work upcoming in Louisiana Review, Cape Rock and Spoon River Poetry Review.