William Taylor Jr. is a contemporary American poet whose work often blends raw honesty with a lyrical, streetwise sensibility. His poetry captures the beauty and despair of ordinary life, focusing on themes such as loneliness, fleeting joy, love, and the inevitability of loss. Taylor Jr. writes with a voice that is both tender and unflinching, reflecting the struggles of urban existence while finding meaning in small, overlooked moments. His style is direct yet musical, often leaning into a conversational tone that makes his reflections accessible and deeply resonant. Many of his poems balance melancholy with hope, turning personal experiences into universal truths about being human.
A Photograph I Want to Paint
The end times have found us
on a Sunday afternoon in September
as we loll about these afterthought days
simply because they're the devil
we know.
I wander the Tenderloin
and end up at Emperor Norton's
where I sit at the bar with a quiet kinship
between myself and the handful of others
staring down their drinks
as the hours slink off to die.
It's as good a church as any,
a temporary haven from the meaner things
the world would show us.
I like the big windows looking out onto Larkin St.
where men fight with bottles and knives
and nod off in sidewalk tents.
There's a pretty junkie girl and she
stumbles a bit, leaning
on a wall laughing a pretty
junkie laugh
like a photograph I want to paint
as everything slides into whatever.
Something as Decent
I am once more drunk
in the afternoon
call it my little bit of
raging against
the machine,
the dying of the light
and the general
dreariness of things.
I'm drinking wine
at a fashionable
Polk St. bar
the people are pretty
and dull
their chatter
is a kind of music
and you
if these words have
somehow found you
I hope you're okay
whoever
wherever
whenever
you are
I hope that something good
still exists for you
I hope there is still music
a distant woman's laughter
or at least something
as decent
as being drunk
in the afternoon.
Taking Every Gift
Go ahead and fall in love with the barefoot folksinger
in the North Beach bar because her songs
are sad and pretty and true.
Embrace every doomed and desperate
love affair, real or imagined,
as each could be your last.
The options for beauty diminish,
the people more gutless
and cruel.
There’s not much left of things in general,
but there’s still that feeling
of the first few beers
while sitting at a sidewalk
table on Haight St.
lifting you away from the world
as you briefly imagine something
might be salvaged after all.
A woman in a wonderful hat saves you
for the next minute or two,
and that’s the thing,
to be saved anew, moment to moment,
until your very last moment,
taking every gift that comes your way.
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.
Why We Sing
The universe is forever
indifferent to our sorrow
and this is why we
make a music of it.
We are god-forgotten
and this is why we dance
the way we do
why we reach for fire
and other things
that burn
why we learn the language
of everything gone
and turn it into song.
Each day we wake
into a world already lost
and this is why we sing.
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.
