Excerpts from
Mad-eyed to the Screen
Nature, rabbit hearts fast beating and razored darknesses off the streets
Copyright © 2025 Greg Philby
An Evening on a Park Bench
Copyright © Greg Philby
I sit beside a woman
with a very large and fancy
magenta hat.
Beneath it she might be very old.
Both hands make one.
They clutch her bag.
She’s stiff as a pigeon.
We sit wordless.
The stars are white hopes
burning up; the sky is beautiful.
The sidewalk cracks are
especially creative today.
Each god damn grass thinks it’s
god damn special.
The trees are so polite.
The birds come off their shifts;
they did jack.
The clouds are a lovely smog.
The sun sets
behind the hardware store,
going down in the alley trash.
Suddenly she says she knows
everything about me.
I believe her.
Nobody
knows me so well.
And nobody wears hats
like that anymore.
Copyright © 2025 Greg Philby
Birds on a Wire
Copyright © Greg Philby
The birds are sitting on a wire,
lined up, facing to the sun.
All of them look one direction.
All of them, but one.
Side by side, they share a viewpoint
comfortable in unison.
Every bird sees what’s before it.
Every bird, but one.
And so they go, the flocks and flocks
in matching feathers, matching thought,
and this would be all that we are
save for the one that’s not.
Copyright © 2025 Greg Philby
The Lovely Fall
Copyright © Greg Philby
October of this year, not
like the Octobers of any other,
crushes through in steel boots,
its color iced out, all
methodical wood. It stiffens
the meadow emotion.
It sorrows the bright eyes
and bends the necks—
nothing personal—
to an offhand death.
It’s a beautiful dispassion,
a blunt Octoberist so deft
at the art that you can’t
help but admire: the unhurried
cold of the blade; the hoisted
gray certainty;
the lovely fall;
the cleave of the heads that
burst in maple crimson.
You watch, we all watch
with our dirty pleasure the
pretty autumn stains. You
know, we all know, that
it’s a lovely fall.
Copyright © 2025 Greg Philby
god tobacco liquor fireworks guns
Copyright © Greg Philby
This is a land where God loves you
unless he don’t.
He will tell you which you are
if you don’t know.
God advertises heavily here,
on billboards and yard signs,
and from the broken mouths
that’ll tell you straight up.
He’s hellbent to clean up the populace,
weedin out those who are them.
The church’ll scrub you white.
Round here, my gun is my shepherd.
At the Bait & Booze
the old trucks lean in,
loading up.
Copyright © 2025 Greg Philby
Blind Man in Tie-Dye
Copyright © Greg Philby
At the bus stop
waits a blind man
in a tie-dye shirt
of brilliant colors
flung as though his
soul blew open.
He sits, patiently,
amid the scuttling
people with emptiness
rattling in their sacks.
The bus comes.
The people rush in
and cling
to blackened windows.
The blind man
taps his white cane,
knocking loose hardpan.
The colors stream
farther down his shirt.
Copyright © 2025 Greg Philby
The Wreckage Dancing after the Wedding
Copyright © Greg Philby
Hips o god,
downslumped old fruit, the
aunts and uncles clumsing the
dance floor; gravity sucked &
life too O there! In the dance-hall
dregs, tap-stepping over a broken
marriage; and there, a lie untwirling so
lovely blind in the lodge dark/drink up!
Dance your dirty ghosts, shake your
limp what ifs/How they sparkle in
your rented skins. Drink up
it’s your old song. To the dancers!
A bouquet to them all!
A longlost garter! A rip
of lace! Dance!
Let them dance.
Copyright © 2025 Greg Philby
Waiting for the Storm
Copyright © Greg Philby
The storm clouds
refuse to come up
though their
dark shaggy heads
mill behind the tree line.
They are close:
big sour-wet dogs
ripping up mud;
deep, shuddering growls
drumming the tight air;
thrashing branches
and madness.
The sky is stained.
The men come out
and stand on their porches,
hair stiff on their necks
and their little
rabbit hearts fast beating,
and they watch
for them to come.
Copyright © 2025 Greg Philby
Diner Fork
Copyright © Greg Philby
Hanging out of her cheap
paper skirt, tines askew,
she’s taken on the tarnish
of those who have used her—
the obese woman hacking up
past sins;
the skink of man with tiny red eyes
and a mouthful
of blue tongue.
She has seen many mouths.
I wish to tell her that I am
different but she
comes up cold in my hand,
dully serves me my reflection
warped on her former gleam,
and there it is, just
another hole of mouth.
I take her
atop the soiled bone china.