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Woodland Pattern™    Book   Center Poetry Archive		John Beer John Beer is the author of The Waste Land and Other Poems (Canarium, 2010). Associative and imaginative, his work has been compared to that of John Ashbery. Poet Lewis Warsh wrote that The Waste Land and Other Poems "embraces and distills 'the bad dream' and all 'the muck' of the recent past, but the momentum of this book is full speed ahead." Beer's criticism has appeared in Verse, the Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, and other magazines. He is a theater writer for Time Out Chicago.

from Sonnets to Morpheus John Beer

What did you have to hope for? A single sun reflected in swamp water, in a building's silver skin. "You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind." Blank checks pile up in the mailbox. Lunchtime: singers in grey hats, ambling past the statue from your first dream. Don't look back. It's the same exact sun you saw as a kid. I looked it up already. Everything else starts slithering across your field of vision. My flight to Bangkok leaves at 5:15. I pack a pair of scissors in my bag, a photograph, an apple, Leaves of Grass. ** Unveiling, that's the stuff. I leave a glass of wine on the table. Ten days later it's still a glass of wine. I'm not myself. A glass of wine the color of nebulae. "Your men are already dead." We were warned, elsewhere, and shouldn't blame the objects: blue bottles, skin, your hand without a ring. I traveled to Bangkok for business purposes. A truck could snap his spine in half. Still he'd rage to whisper the truth in a last gargling breath. Nothing stops him: insidious drugs or robots run amok. Out-dreaming the ones who dreamt being into being, he hopes us along. In Bangkok, I'm trying to say, I looked in a mirror and nothing looked back.

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