EMMA

She’s always losing something,

never knows where she put it,

doesn’t even know what it is

most of the time.

Everything in the house

has been mislaid at some time or other.

Even when she comes across something

that’s been missing for years

she can’t remember losing it

so it’s not really found.

Her motto is,

“Everything in its place.

That way, nothing is.”

John Grey   

THE SPRING IN MY STEP

The world returns.

Oak partners with elm,

with willow,

to bring it to me,

leaf by leaf,

songbird by songbird.

The warm of my heart

is shared by the grass,

the wildflowers.

Yesterday’s melt

is today’s bloom.

The world would not

be back here otherwise.

John Grey   

LIAR

I’m not the criminal liar,

the one who says this check is covered.

Nor am I the gossipy liar

with mouth awash in fabricated rumors.

There’s a little of the ad-man liar in me,

especially when I put pen to paper.

Poetic license, after all, is written in hyperbole.

I don’t think I’m the evil liar,

none of this, no problem,

the driving’s fine

when sheets of black ice

coat the roadways.

And I try not to be the guilty liar,

red-faced, who says,

“I did not break the vase.”

I do my best not to break vases

in the first place.

I admit I am the lover liar,

though not of the cheating kind.

Not having seen them all,

I can still proclaim you

the most beautiful of women.

With nothing to compare it to,

my love is clearly the deepest,

the strongest, the longest-lived.

You prefer that kind of lie.

Or, at least, you say you do.

John Grey   

John Grey has been published recently in the Echolocation, Santa Fe Poetry Review and Caveat Lector with work upcoming in Clark Street Review, Poem and the Evansville Review