‘THE KINDS OF POEMS’, ‘OTHER PEOPLE’ & ‘TEACHER IN AN EMPTY CLASSROOM’

Rich Spang was born in San Francisco, living in many places usually near water and on islands. His scientist father was an award winning photographer and was never without a camera. Neither was Rich. Largely self taught, Rich was trained as an architectural draftsman, has been an art show roadie for a successful painter, a musician, a Scuba Instructor in Los Angeles and Maui and also a volunteer diver for the Seattle Aquarium. Rich’s “day job” was as an electronics technician and he has recently retired from Seattle Children’s Hospital where he provided IT support for the medical staff. Besides Photography, Rich is an avid reader and obsessive gardener.

THE KINDS OF POEMS
There are love poems
and there are death poems.
The former are odes
to young people.
The latter are elegies
to the old.
But slowly
and inexorably,
the young age
and the poems
eventually teeter between
the grace, the elegance,
and the inevitable.
Eventually.
the love poems
and the death poems
merge into
the substance and consequence
of life poems.
Those are the ones
I’m writing now.

OTHER PEOPLE
They point at me on the street,
shout, “He’s the one! He did it!”
They don’t give chase.
They don’t call a cop.
They figure pointing and shouting is enough.
Others join the chorus.
Some lean out of windows.
Others cry out from passing cars.
I have done so much to fit in.
I dress like others.
I comb my hair neatly.
I hold down an ordinary job.
I join in sports talk.
I even laugh at the same jokes,
Yet, there’s something about me.
Even I can sense it.
I point and shout at myself sometimes.
“He’s the one! He did it!”
That’s nothing I haven’t said already.

TEACHER IN AN EMPTY CLASSROOM
He writes his name on the blackboard.
Then chalks up a map.
And then a formula,
followed by an equation,
some historical dates,
and a parsed sentence.
There are the people in the world
who need to see this stuff,
to remember it,
and, if they and he are lucky,
to understand it.
He stares out the window.
He looks at his watch.
Now where are they?
he wonders.
Now where is anyone anymore?

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly and Tenth Muse. Latest books, ”Between Two Fires”, “Covert” and “Memory Outside The Head” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, Amazing Stories and River and South.