Midsummer Dream House

 

RELATIVE HAPPINESS

Don’t come to me with your relative happiness.
Don’t tell me how
pain is not quite so bad these days,
that the half empty cup you’ve been toting around
from poetry reading in the Bronx
to late night tears in my apartment
is now half full.
Don’t share with me how your neuroses
are now just character strains,
those suicidal impulses merely
an incentive to slit the veins
of one part of a life
so the rest of it can go free.

I don’t want to know that
with nothing more than
a third floor flat and a second hand television
and a jug of wine and maybe
two or three close friends,
you zapped up all of those heart wounds,
manufactured the platonic lover
you always longed for
out of dust mites and spiderwebs.
Your family are dead.
Well here’s a new family
made of cheese and crackers,
good books, the telephone.

I don’t want to be around
when you say that if you get over a cold
then you’ve gotten over a cancer.
I want everything to matter so much
that nothing else matters.
I want to carry my hurt to the grave,
never recover from anything that ails me.
I don’t want a picture of reality
that you can stick on a wall
like a framed view of the steady, reliable ocean.
I need it to grow its tumors in me,
so big, so toxic, they make themselves
known to every feeling, every thought.

If I get up from this and admit to myself
that I can get over it,
then it never really happened.
Nothing has happened.

I want my plagues to devour me,
not strengthen me,
my bankruptcies to leave me penniless,
my broken love affairs to
really break beyond repair.

So keep your new dignity, new pride,
new ways of dealing with the world
to yourself.
Relative happiness is a fraud.
It never was and never could be
the happiness we deserve.

 

Poetry by John Grey 

 

 

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly and Lost Pilots. Latest books, Between Two Fires, Covert and Memory Outside The Head are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in California Quarterly, Seventh Quarry, La Presa and Doubly Mad.