A Few More Hours of Sunlight

We drink beer in your kitchen
and talk of the lives of dead poets

while outside the window
is the September sun
and beneath it the city streets
and the people who carry their lives
like corpses on their backs.

They wait for busses and taxis,
they wait for their tiny phones to ring
and all the lights to finally turn green,

as if they truly believed
things had any interest in being done.

Ambition is for
ambitious men,

let's leave them to it.

If history's to be believed
we'll all end up badly one day,
and what of it?

We've another bottle in the fridge
and a few more hours of sunlight.

William Taylor Jr. lives and writes in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. His poems and stories have been widely published in the independent press in publications including Poesy, The Chiron Review and The New York Quarterly. Taylor is the author of the poetry collections, Words for Songs Never Written (Centennial Press 2007) and The Hunger Season (Sunnyoutside, 2009). An Age of Monsters is his first collection of prose. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

TPQ3