Category: Original Poems

An old song on the radio
is heard again in one’s forties
after many years of interlude
during which the song
and memories of the song
have lain apart, dormant.

At the song’s new playing
here in the diner on a Saturday
some old idea is newly understood,
a truth revealed which had been hidden
years before back when the song
was often played on the radio.

How to reply, from that point on
when the children ask “Is this the one?”
Something has changed.

Background sounds intercede;
forks clinking, murmured conversation.
The song plays on.  You know each note.

“It was my favorite, when I was young.”

-B Taylor, 2016

Electric cable towers
Giants ever statues
Recall no deeds nor lives

Uphold the course of power
Trusses ever static
And rust in single file

B Taylor 1994

A man without any business sense.
A man who lives in the present tense.

A man wielding a large axe
splitting logs, which he then stacks.

A man disinterested in his dinner.
A man who states aloud: “I am a winner.”

A man laughing at his child’s joke.
A man without a job and broke.

An angry man, slowly becoming
sad instead. A man running.

A man blind to his own violence.
A man who realizes, and repents.

A man screaming at the screen-
a madman, for his chosen team.

A man alone with his fears
on a dark porch as daybreak nears.

A man eating a hot pepper by itself.
A man pulling whiskey down from a high shelf.

An old man who thinks of his childhood home,
reading a short and simple poem.

B Taylor 2020

My wife refrained from stretching out
her legs in bed, so as not to disturb
the dog lying there. Although I doubt

the dog was actually lying there.
It was dark and I could not see him
in the blackness, with his black hair.

The actual dog does not sit, nor fetch;
nor was he actually on the bed
in that space into which her legs would stretch.

She feared the dog would be inconvenienced; 
though I don’t think it’s possible to inconvenience
a dog. (That is one difference between us.)

And I’m very sure that an idea cannot 
be inconvenienced. It just cannot.
Nevertheless, though it was a bit hot

and she would have preferred mightily
to stretch her foot out from under the covers
instead she remained curled up tightly

in a ball and endured, so as not to be a
hinderance or bother, and continued
to accommodate herself around an idea.

For while the actual dog was absent in this case
the idea of the dog was quite real
in that night, in that particular space.

B Taylor 2020

for Tom and Dee and M&M

Next to me on this airplane
a lawyer, or executive
just looked at photos of his wife

and daughter playing ukulele
in their living room together.
I glanced a moment. He did not notice.

We are over the pacific.
Somewhere below, on a green mountainside
an island girl plays a ukulele.

I play ukulele a little bit.
My oldest daughter plays it too.
We two together, just a bit.

Travel safe, executive.
Return home to the mountainside.
Return home and remove your tie.

It was right that you missed them.
They await you patiently
on the green mountainside of home.

B Taylor 2016

Soybean fields like rust
creep beneath the mist.

Brown gnats swirl around –
dust motes in a dusty land.

Patternless chickens
scatter in all directions.

In aggregate the cows meander,
churning slow as the deep river.

The man sees straight lines in his shingles.
He nails fence rails to more fence rails,

building northward until dark.
Stars emerge then, and trace their arc

across the sky, reliable
as the Maker’s word, inviolable.

B Taylor, 2015

A light goes out
in one window
along our street –
a new shadow.

A new unknown
against the trees.
Their leaves drift down
quiet as thieves.

A white owl stalks
cold and silent.
The night nurse walks
without intent.

Light is a coin
spent and gone.
Let’s move on.
We must move on.

B Taylor, 2016

So well built, and so polished.
She is above my grade. And yet
agrees to clasp herself onto
my forearm for the evening.

Being a man of a certain age
I understand how this appears.
I am foolish to desire her.
Ours is but a paid arrangement.

The other men here turn their eyes
a bit too long, coveting
her golden exotic profile.
In victory, I am uncomfortable.

She is blameless in all this.
She did not solicit me.  But still
must she be so mechanical?-
never a smile on her silver face,

nor embrace from her slender hands?
When pressed she only muses on
about the the time, and how it passes
bit by bit by bit by bit.

B Taylor, 2020

How did it happen? He, who years before
counseled prefects and nobles in weighty matters
was preaching now, unkempt, his robes in tatters,
asquat out on the hard piazza floor.

They say his words took on a fevered tone-
Unified opposites. Universal flame!
The pathways up and downward are yet the same!
The few who stopped to hear moved quickly on.

Most said he was insane.  Some said obscure-
deep intellect yes, but plagued by incoherence.
Such philosophers win few adherents.
Whatever ailed his mind, he sought no cure.

I heard he succumbed to dropsy and psychosis.
It was rumored he wrote the fragments from his mind
into a book for far pupils to find
someday, who might then fix the diagnosis.

Bill Taylor 2017

I fly
with my little eye

peering down
on a little town.

Something red-
the clouds ahead.

Deepening blue-
the sky’s hue.

Flickering white-
little lights

coming on
in the little town.

Bill Taylor 2018