WILLIAM TAYLOR JR.

What the People Want

All the people want is the saddest song
they’ve ever known
playing on repeat at 3 a.m.

and someone’s assurance
that their failings are predestined
and pretty in the eyes of a kind
and forgiving universe.

They just want a new drug
to make them forget everything
that’s ever happened
and remember it all forever at once,

with no cancer
or hangover in the morning.

They just want directions
to the nearest fire escape,
the closest chicken exit,

a back door in the break room
somebody forgot to lock.

The people only want to live long enough
to see the death of god.

They only want revenge upon the world
and a quiet place to lay their head
as they drift off to the white noise
of the end of it all.

They just want to feel life’s great fire
coursing through their blood
one last time even if it
kills them.

They want the sad music to play
all through the night

and then for the dawn
to forget their name.

William Taylor Jr. lives and writes in San Francisco. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, and a volume of fiction. His work has been published widely in literary journals, including Rattle, The New York Quarterly, and The Chiron Review. He was a recipient of the 2013 Kathy Acker Award, and edited Cocky Moon: Selected Poems of Jack Micheline (Zeitgeist Press, 2014). His new poetry collection, The People Are Like Wolves to Me, is forthcoming from Roadside Press.