SurVision Magazine

Yellow Poem, Blue Poem, Red Poem


Yellow poem says it's sorry
that everything passes away.
Sunset. Oak leaves in fall -
you know, the things poets say
when they mean they are afraid.
Yellow poem says go on,
be afraid. Be yellow.
If you never write a poem again,
at least you'll still have fear.

Blue poem says come on and
have a drink. It knows twelve bars
where you can sink good and deep
down in the blue. It says
the sky ain't cryin', baby.
That's just words to take the place
of a scream that would come out blue.
Blue poem says now drink. Now smoke.
Come be the whole blue goddam sky.

Red poem don't say nothing.
Red poem is a rope with one knot
in your chest, one knot in your throat,
one knot right between your eyes.
Red poem knows you know
it's the one true poem.
It's in your blood. It's in your eyes.
It's the color your words make
when you ain't got time
for no more yellow or blue.
Red poem's the one with teeth.
Red poem's got you by the balls.




Every Story Is a Ghost Story


The heart brims full with
libraries of the dead,
Alexandrias that never run out
of flames. For one tale
we leave out whiskey and blood-
red beef. For another the tribute
is rice and the Sunday comics.
A hundred dead monkeys hammer
a hundred dead keyboards.
One begins as a self-help book
and ends as an amnesiac's memoir.
Let the digitizing begin:
the world's run out of pulp
and circumstance demands a reckoning.
Alas, the book club is putting on weight:
here we are again and just last week,
tea and cakes.




R. G. Evans teaches high school and college English and Creative Writing in New Jersey, USA. His books include Overtipping the Ferryman (Aldrich Press Poetry Prize, 2013), The Noise of Wings, and The Holy Both. His poems have appeared in Rattle, Paterson Literary Review, and Backlash (Great Britain,) among many others. His debut CD of original songs, Sweet Old Life, was released in 2018.