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Beneath the Judgment of the Sun

I’m back in Bakersfield
for the first time in years,
drunk at some tired hotel
down by the jail
and the bail bond stations.
I’m here for a wedding,
a funeral, something.
I’m wandering the streets
marveling at how people
still live and die their lonely lives
in these shabby houses by the train stations
with the dying lawns and the brown plastic
kiddie pools half filled with brackish water,
the rusted sprinklers, the dented mail boxes
with little red flags uselessly raised.
People wander the parking lots
like bitter zombies blasted
on whatever they could score.
Out on Chester Avenue
the pretty girls are still too young
for their clothes, their eyes,
the smiles on their faces.
The boxlike churches
all painted white, each the same,
dark birds circling above.
The parents are gone, strangers
in my childhood home, streets
overrun with gangs and neglect.
I consider my friends,
my brother and sister,
how they never escaped
and I wonder what it is
that’s kept them here.
Some of the old bars are decent enough,
quiet, dim, and unassuming,
still useful for hiding from the day.
But now I’m back out beneath
the judgment of the sun,
walking the wide and empty boulevards
lined with decomposing houses.
I note the sad stories told by objects
abandoned in the gutters,
I feel the presence of every
sad ghost, wondering if
they miss me the way
I do them.

Another Poem About Mr. Bing’s

It’s a warm April evening
in the 21st century
and I’m out in North Beach
drinking drinks
and looking at the pretty people.
I like the lights and the music.
I’m too shy to dance but it’s fun to watch.
I’m sitting at a table outside of Mr. Bing’s
and an aging biker chick sidles up
and chats with me a bit
until she gets bored and drifts along.
I didn’t understand her but I liked her okay
and wouldn’t have minded
if she’d stuck around a little while
but I guess I didn’t have whatever it was
she was looking for.
That’s a common thing, these days,
hardly anybody has what anybody else
is looking for.
They call it the human condition,
I think.
Just like the rest of us,
the world’s gone on too long
and no longer knows what to do
with itself.
Just in the nick of time they
play an Iggy Pop song which gives me
something new to cling to for the next
three minutes.
A drunk guy steps outside to smoke,
he’s overly friendly and he’s asking me questions
and he wants to be friends.
He doesn’t have whatever it is
I’m looking for so I shrug
and turn away and pretend
to write this poem.

You’re Not Wilfred Owen

You’re not Wilfred Owen, we don’t need another poem
telling us how war is an unkind thing
and the death of children is something
civilized folk should have no truck with.

War and its lackeys wipe their asses with poetry
and dying children have no interest in such things.

What we could really use are poems reminding us to be ashamed
of how we daily throw away our lives at the whims
of the dull and the servile.

Give us not your poems workshopped into bland competence
rendered useless and sterile, dead upon the vine,

poems of virtue by the virtuous,
pristine of craft but lacking heart,

poems as useless
as bags of tissue paper in the rain,

poems that couldn’t get themselves arrested.

Give us poems as broken and as frightened
and as unrepentant as our problematic souls,

imperfect poems with imperfect voices
demanding to exist without permission of the community.

Give us poems reminding us it is worthwhile to be alive
despite the evidence suggesting otherwise.

Get outta town with your poems born only
to chase down the lowest common
denominator of a mediocre heart.

Give us poems that speak
in the ancient language of fire
because death is on our ass

and the whole world’s trying to sell us
their empty words even though
we’ve already paid.

about the artist

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.

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