Do You Understand The Gravity Of Your Situation?
By John Garmon
Things break down
Warranties expire
Weather changes
Fewer birds sing anymore
Love however says it clears a way
Day gives up to dark
Stars seem blinking from another universe
All is circumstantial
Everything is existential
It is all ultimately inconsequential
Everything is political
Asteroids orbit in their asteroid belt
Unidentified flying objects are observed
Inevitably you find a few answers
Swallow your embarrassment
Anxiety you can’t control
Take microdoses of Adderall
Look for a life to swap out
This world is no one’s property
The shapes of your dreams
Burn your scrapbooks
Recent infrequency blamed
Come back to sing and dance.
John Garmon is an 85-year-old former president of Berkeley City College, former Marine, former Uber and Lyft driver, native Texan who hasn't been there in over 30 years, novelist with 40+ books, poems in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Commonweal, Oddball Magazine, The Florida Review, The Oregonian, Southern Humanities Review, Radius, New Mexico Humanities Review, Oyster River Pages, Assisi, Poet Lore, South Dakota Review, and many other magazines and anthologies. He was named poet of the year by the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Society of Florida, in 2000, and served as the featured author/poet at the John Foix Festival in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, 1986. Ph.D. in American and British Literature from Ball State University.
