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Best Poems Written by Billy Marshall Stoneking

Below are the all-time best Billy Marshall Stoneking poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Billy Marshall Stoneking Poem

Integration

Being an American in Australia isn’t easy,

but I’m trying to integrate;

I’m trying to fit in.

Just one of the boys with all the right expressions

under my belt, like:

        pasty glut

        cosmetic spring roll rut

        five o’clock shadow cigarette butt.


I mean, I’m trying to integrate;

I’m trying to fit in.

 
I try to talk about the good ol’ U.S. of A.,

and I’ve never mentioned Uncle Sam once,

except to suspect he lives inside Colonel Sanders

who also gives me a big pain in the ass

with his mysterious suppository herbs & spices;

cos I’m trying to fit in, see?

I’m trying to integrate.

 
Okay, I can get nervous about women,

and cover it up under muscle and toughness, O.K.!

Say: “All sheilas are made fer ****in’!”

while dreaming:

         leather cock thrust

         beer lubrication

         violet steak lips!

Say: “All poets are poofs!” and

beat my balls around fields of green

with wooden sticks so stiff and clean, screaming

          semen icing power

          spread on scones of breasts!   


Bloody hell! Can’t ya see?

I’m trying to integrate,

trying to fit in.

 
Like wearing high-heeled snow-shoes

and roller-skater shirts;

doing al the expected things, even tho’

my Balinese sarong trips me up occasionally.

I’ve got a sun-tanned asshole,

and I’m keeping me nose to the ground,

no bloody fear! I’m integrating, ya see?

Trying to sit in.

 
I’m a tough-fisted slow-sauntering grog-pissing

knife balling tit watching boong hating self-deceiving

regular visionless mate of no matter:

 
              Swallowed by deserts

                       and the fear of ******s;

              Tortured by sun

                       and the freeze of lost passion;

              Murdered in business;

                        resurrected in wages!

              Enslaved in the cities and

                         imprisoned by FACTS

that stretch from my body

in steel rails of tracks I ride on,

              I hide on:

                          I’ve lost where I’ve been.

But I’m integrating

                          (yeah, INTEGRATING!)

I’m just fitting in.

Details | Billy Marshall Stoneking Poem

Cell Phone

The dead can offer you nothing
except your own, hard work.
Don’t stand so close.
Their reach is longer than your fear.
They are desperadoes with
nothing to lose,
nothing to give,
only more of the same.

Don’t stare too hard
at those full of their own emptiness.
They have nothing to offer,
nothing in their words, their eyes,
they can’t offer their hearts -
they have none.

If you look too long
you begin might begin
to think you’re just like them,
catching the light rail
eternally stuck between where
they’ve come from
and where you’re going.

Details | Billy Marshall Stoneking Poem

The Duck Blind

Every autumn in the Chaos Mountains
the wind blows through the tall grass
& the rain stalls, fitful in its sublimity.
It is not a season for speaking. Only for listening.
Out there, somewhere beyond the horizon
a silence that is not silence, calls,
& men enter the duck blind, and wait,
huddled with their cartridges & ambiguities,
disguised to themselves as hunters,
re-inventing themselves with rifle eyes
fixed on some vanishing point beyond the language
of rivers & trees, turned away from
the here & now - a tempting non-existence
accompanied by hope, which may be nothing more
than the promise of a big dinner with
lots of stuffing and gravy and no questions.

Details | Billy Marshall Stoneking Poem

The Place Where Karma Originated

The sign outside the monastery reads:
“Near this spot, karma
first entered the world.” -
beside it, a small slot in a wooden box
painted white, with “DONATIONS”
in red letters scrawled across the top.

The cobbled track between the stalls
& shops is both narrow & steep, a maze of
potholes & ruts, karma’s answer to ‘tourist traps’ -
a holy obstacle course for the pressed & dressed
& impeccably plain, coming & going outside
the money exchange, where dogs & beggars
compete with American Express in 15 languages,
& lunch is a handful of flies & stones
next to an old woman working her fan,
frowning over a brazier whose coals are eyes.

When they’ve discovered I’ve been to the edge,
to the village where karma originated,
they’ll want to know what it’s like,
so I’ll tell them: it’s the coldest, darkest place
I’ve ever seen, full of the meanest people
I’ve ever met, grasping for change.
Like all those other places where karma originated.
A memory of footprints, every trace of hand or hair,
at every corner a familiar smell, a fall from grace,
every beggar an answer, meting out an earned revenge.
All places are recognizable in time.

Outside the place where karma originated,
I ask someone if they’ll take my picture as a kind of
souvenir, something to see, evidence I was here, or
there, or anywhere. They hold my camera upside-down
as if to dare the logic from its cage.
No smile. No cheese.
The shutter shudders, the light burns in
& the smallest part of me escapes into the prison
through which we all must pass in order to be free.

Details | Billy Marshall Stoneking Poem

Virgo

There is no dictionary large enough
to contain the words I need
to write this down. Virgo, child of doubt,
server of scars. My perfection is
a cracked pot that knows only questions
and voices huddled round silence that
shape an unnameable darkness
with singing impenetrable by light.

Curled up deep inside every dream,
my song rises in the throat, but
will not come out. This lump
that lives down deep, inside hope.
We learn too late the unteachable things -
like how this Abyss overtakes us,
even if we refuse to jump.
Creatures loyal to the asking,
we tear ourselves apart and call it life;
and love, at best, a temporary healing.
something unteachable.

Where is the bandage that can cover
this tear? As if it wanted fixing.

Details | Billy Marshall Stoneking Poem

The Crime

(for Neil)

I wonder if you remember,
the dog you killed that day
on the way back from the Stony Rises?

You were driving, talking about
yourself, I think,
or maybe you were singing along
to some song on the radio.

Up ahead, the boy on a bicycle
pedaled against the wind,
dog by his side.

It happened so quickly,
you were driving so fast
you nearly didn’t stop,
thinking, hoping, perhaps,
that you’d only imagined it.

When we backed up the boy was
on his knees, hands hovering over
the dead animal.

"Sorry about that, mate,"
was all you could say.

Fighting back tears and disbelief
the boy looked up:

"Oh, that’s all right," he said.

Details | Billy Marshall Stoneking Poem

Conversation

her phone call had the desired effect.
like always - it drew blood,
the way she dialed into the neglect of
a lifetime was no re-enactment,
it was all fresh, as if it had just happened.
“you never look at it from my point of view,’
she said, hoping silently to break her,
so that nobody won. love can be like that.
it means nothing unless it’s headed
in your direction -
& she, the wounded child,
exacting her revenge, would maintain
the punishment until that time
when her own child stared back
with the same exacting eyes, silently,
asking, where were you, then?

Details | Billy Marshall Stoneking Poem

Mothers and Daughters

The phone call went badly, again -
the old arguments about ego & neglect
and how you didn’t love me, not really.
And the weeping.
At 50, she was still stuck,
repeating the same accusations.
“The damage, the damage you caused.”
She didn’t want her mother to think
she’d come through it unscathed.
Not ever. She’d worked too hard to
become something she wasn’t,
someone must be to blame.
She was so clever, so clean, so intelligent -
how could she be so unhappy?
The unformed artist weighed down
by someone else’s baggage.
When her artist/mother said:
You have to work with it, use it, create with it,
she howled: “Stop talking over me.”
It was like saying get rid of yourself.
Knowing herself that well,
she hardly knew what she was.

Details | Billy Marshall Stoneking Poem

I Have Poems

I have poems that would rather sleep
with women than be written down,
that stumble round in unmade rooms,
unwashed & unafraid -

poems in search of tongues that have
no answers to the world’s problems and
don’t pretend to, that have no tips about
what to do in Fukushima
other than dance the night away -

poems with scars that desire
touch, having spent themselves
in the company of the deaf,
craving love & death with equal breaths,
between a gasping nakedness that
knows its place and the price you pay
for loving much and too unwisely.

I have poems that left home years ago
without so much as a phone call or fax,
huddled in the eternity of a Tuscan train,
watching, unnoticed, as the visiting soloist
practices Brahms, dreaming as the carriage rocks,
her fingers dancing on the fret-less case.

Details | Billy Marshall Stoneking Poem

Divided Heart

I don’t want to be the other half of 
something someone lost a long time ago.  
I’m not interested in being 
the better part of valour.  
Everybody learns the hard way,  
one way or another.  No matter 
how good you are at numbers,
you can only count up to broken, 
forever.
So eat your liver & onions. 
It should come as no surprise 
to discover the divided heart 
multiplies nothing. 
Any child can tell you 
love is invisible geography 
& Reality’s the only fiction. 
The more you look, the less you see. 
Like insects whose words are feelers, 
we strive to recollect the half-
remembered that deeply mattered, 
witnesses to rashness 
passing as bravery. 
Despite the bad jokes 
& Chardonnay 
there’s an absence of humour
In what we say. 
By resurrecting the dead we glorify 
our names, our reputations
as artists, misfits & revolutionaries. 
Savages together, 
we toast our mutual savagery – 
hear hear!! – the clinking solidarity
of well-heeled somebodies.