Poet

Art by Jack Brady (current issue)

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The Ancient Greeks didn’t have blue.

The oceans were the color of wine,

and the sky was void,

too crawling with gods to have room for hue.

They wrote plays like confessions then,

spitting them out like hot potatoes

burning their tongues in their haste to tell the world what they wished was true

before they shared what really was.

Homer sat at home, with you

and he didn’t look at you like you wanted him to.

because his head and heart were full of crawling things

rotting from the inside out

and he didn’t know how to love you if you weren’t a rhyming couplet.

He wrote the greatest story ever

and then he wrote an even better one.

He wrote you a love poem, once

and you put it in your dress

on your skin

but it was the only one.

And still the sky didn’t have a color,

though to you it looked crimson red,

to love someone like him.

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