Author: Greg Keeler

Greg Keeler is a Montana songwriter, poet, writer, artist, humorist, and professor. He also plays the guitar, harmonica, and kazoo.

EG 13

In Quotes

Which should I do first, make my bed
or write this poem. In the poem my bed
is already made, but in my bed I dream
in poems. If only I could write my dreams
as poems, but they would only come out
as tap-dances, such as the one you are
now hearing. In the dream I was racing
naked through the night, a dagger in
my teeth, a rose in my hand. Or was
it the other way around? Anyhoo,
it didn’t have much to do with anything
but tap-dancing once I put it down
on “paper.” I put paper in quotes because
it’s really just binary code on a screen.

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EG 14

After the Zoom

When we finally got to stop zooming
and meet in person again, we didn’t
know we had lost something in the process.
We had left part of ourselves in the cloud
or in some less random configuration
that can be digitized in binary numbers.
A couple of us said they had forgotten
how to love, that they’d abandoned
their hands and all they could feel
for a smidgen too long, and made love
like arcade crane machines, always
dropping the stuffed toy at the last
second, feeling compelled to speak
pigeon English, as in me want fuck.

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EG 15

That Same Sun

The sun that rises every day says I
don’t care to the torments of love.
Jim Harrison wrote that shortly before
he died. I find it hard to believe him.
I have talked to that same sun, watched
its comings and goings for three quarters
of a century. Is there not still torment in
watching one another die? And what
is that if not love? Has that same sun
not wrinkled us to husks and driven us
indoors to click through pictures of
the dead just to feel it in our guts,
to light up the old neural paths,
the palimpsests of our pain?

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EG 16

If It Can Be Said

This is my letter to humankind,
said the idiot to his computer,
which took it all down and punctuated
it, slicked it up for the hard copy.
He was old enough now to talk to trees
and ask them serious questions
though they were seldom inclined toward
answering him, and when they were
it was all in his mind, if it can be said
he had one. But enough of the idiot,
let’s talk of you who have happened upon this
in your languishing lives. You, too, have
resorted to words to inflate a sense
of meaning until it pops.

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EG 17

Limes

In my dreams I keep a journal of
what happens in my dreams. Awake
I am not privy to its pages, just an image
or two bobbing to the surface: a dead fish,
a treasure chest of chestnuts. It is a
difficult journal to keep because dreams
are made of something more substantial
than imagery can convey. Its pages are
light green with dark green lines. In
the dream the lines can also be limes,
because the journalist is hard of hearing.
It is difficult to write on limes,
especially if you only
have a ballpoint pen.

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EG 18

Reminder

I have always wanted to carry a little notebook
around to jot down my epiphanies and later
incorporate them into my poetry, but so far
my efforts have only led to phone numbers
and grocery lists. I can’t use the numbers
because they are private, and who wants
to hear about eggs, milk and ham, unless
they remind you of things you need on
your own grocery list? I know there are certain
among you who would rather have your
memories refreshed about celery, cheese
and oven cleaner than about the way
the sun strikes a periwinkle or how
perky people stir terror in my soul.

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EG 19

Easy Go

You are standing on a precipice over
a vast chasm. You are holding an emerald
the size of a lime. You need to adjust your
uncomfortable underwear. A hawk soars
straight at you, perches on your head and
starts preening. You say aloud to yourself,
what next, as if by just saying it, you might
cause it not to happen. But no, here’s
a cloud that looks like an elephant
mounting a rhinoceros. You grow dizzy
looking at it. You lose your balance.
You start to fall. The hawk flies off.
You reach down to adjust your
underwear. You drop the emerald.

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EG 20

All I Can Handle

I have never been very good at thinking
outside the box even though it is only
made of cardboard. You’d think I could
think my way through it, but thinking
inside the box is about all I can handle
because just when I’m getting the hang
of it, they put me in a bigger box and say,
think outside of that, mother fucker, so
unbeknownst to them, I drill a tiny peep
hole in my new box and try to think
through it. I am stricken with horror
by the image; then it dawns on me that they
might be using my mother metaphorically,
that there’s a whole new box out there.

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EG 21

How Bad Is It?

I am told that I am wasting my time writing
shit like this, which puzzles me because
I thought that shit was too good of a word
for what I write. So why, you might ask,
would I continue to do it? It, you might say,
is in my blood. And you say, worse than
shit in your blood? I mean like, how bad
can writing get? And I say, you don’t
want to know how bad it can get.
You have followed me this far, five
beats away from the future, and still
you don’t know how very, very bad
it can get. It keeps on going
after it’s supposed to end.

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EG 22

Prolific

I used to be able to write three of these
in an hour. Any more I have to think
too much. Thinking takes time I might
otherwise spend doing things. Right
now I am trying to write, to think through
my fingers so to speak, and it’s not working
out too well. I look at my watch and see
that this process has already consumed
forty minutes and I’m only nine lines in.
What am I doing? What was I thinking?
Someone do the math for me. I have
too much time on my hands, or should I say
in my hands? Time is at my fingertips,
which are about a foot from my brain.

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