William Taylor

Poem Written While Getting a Decent Buzz Before Going to the Record Store

I’m still a sucker for the gorgeous absurdity
of the people walking along Haight St.
beneath the old San Francisco sky,
buying records and tacos and whiskey-ginger ales,
the impossible beauty of a young woman
studying the menu at a sidewalk table,
the tours busses and the big-eyed
street kids still searching for the summer of love.
I drink beer outside Murio’s and imagine myself
the Walt Whitman of the end times.
The biker chick bartender is pleasantly indifferent
and a gin-drinking woman tries to engage me in conversation.
She wants to tell me about how everything
was different in the 1970s,
how this building used to be another building
and how this jukebox used to be a different jukebox
with different songs
but I take my drink outside to my plastic table
where I might better write about my loneliness.
A large man drinking many whiskeys
as he talks on his phone asks me what I do.
I tell him something vague
and he tells me I look like a star,
he tells me he’s in the music industry.
He wants to tell me stories
about the people and things he’s done
but I shake his hand and tell him
I have to catch a bus.
He spills whiskey on his shirt and tie
as he laughs and waves me away.
A few blocks away a man in a dirty dinosaur outfit
asks me for change as the punk kids sneer
and the sidewalk dead heads grin and take another hit,
immune to death and other machinations of the man,
all of us caught here together
in the poisonous glory of whatever
the hell this is, our dumbass hearts
breaking eternally for nothing in particular
and everything at once.

 

The Closest Thing to Peace

It's nice, just
sitting up alone
drinking dark beer,
hanging about the apartment,
caught somewhere between sorrow and joy.
The cats are curled up upon the couch.
And I'm at my desk
watching TV through the windows
of the apartment across the street,
wondering about the people
alive in those buildings so much like my own.
It's nice, just existing in these few hours
in-between all the others in which so much
that is absurd and impossible is expected of you,
nice just basking awhile in the closest
thing to peace you are allowed.
Most days, from the moment you wake
there's something on your tail
or around the next corner,
longing to do you in.
I imagine myself momentarily
safe from such harm
as I open another beer and look down
upon all the cars on Franklin St.
in search of destinations.
I’m thinking about Richard Brautigan,
I’m thinking about a girl,
I’m thinking about what possibilities
might yet remain.
And part of me says, leave it alone,
don't make more of it than there is.
It's not that interesting,
nobody cares.
Not everything needs to be a poem.
And yet here we are.

 

William Taylor Jr. lives and writes in San Francisco.He is the author of numerous books of poetry, and one of fiction. His work has been published widely in literary journals, including Rattle, The New York Quarterly, and The Chiron Review. His latest collection, A Room Above a Convenience Store, is available from Roadside Press.