“THE GUY WHO THINKS HE’S HOT”

By John Grey

Right when you think

it’s just your life that makes an impact,

here comes .another summer.

And this affair of yours,

it’s like a shadow unwilling

to be burnt off

by a sun that has come across

great distances to be here,

allows nothing to resist its flame.

With one flash, it can swap

the faces, the bodies, out of passion,

replace it with a blinding hunger to cool down.

It can take your supposed romantic eye

and make an August fire of it,

bright red, perfumed with heat.

The sun is relentless, beyond industrious.

It can turn time into fury,

the useless struggles of the heart

into a raw and painful burn

.

Look at the sun why don’t you,

See how it stretches the day,

works the hours into its own time-table.

For a time, you think you’re drinking yourself out of it

or waving a fan to drive it back.

And then, when that won’t work,

you unemployed echo of a feckless lover’s moon,

you try grumbling at overheated blood,

while you’re all the time more fused to it,

sweating your obedience.

The sun finally does put itself away,

but only for a time, and not completely.

The scorch lingers.

Bulbs copy-cat light like a lover’s heat

Two delusions shining on

 

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in Midwest Quarterly, Poetry East and North Dakota Quarterly with work upcoming in South Florida Poetry Journal, Hawaii Review and Roanoke Review.