I Wish I Was Billy Collins: Poems by Pete McLaughlin
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About this ebook
These are poems to read and reread and then to read aloud to friends. Even nonplussed strangers will smile knowingly after being ushered into Pete McLaughlin’s world, laughing at his manic, self-deprecating take on the grim horror of waking up to find yourself a divorced middle-aged dude living by yourself with a cat, one given to fits of projectile vomiting.
The poems range from a riff on the yearning of an “Angry Prius” who just wants to get out in the fast lane, one time, and drive all-out “mercilessly tailgating all comers,/ even senior citizens,” to the revelations of “Middle Age,” about being picked up by a woman in her sixties who “plays teasing, exploratory footsie beneath the tablecloth/her unblinking green-light eyes/locked mercilessly onto mine/she winks knowingly, her big toe somehow in my pocket now.”
Pete McLaughlin
Pete McLaughlin grew up in San Francisco and was a standout runner in high school and at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, before earning his teaching credential. He was an elementary school teacher and a high school coach for years before moving to Santa Cruz, California, where he often played his trumpet alone on the bluffs looking out at the pounding Pacific.
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I Wish I Was Billy Collins - Pete McLaughlin
I WISH I WAS BILLY COLLINS
I wish I was Billy Collins.
No, not George Clooney, just good old Billy C.
I bet Billy lives in some
charming upstate hamlet,
probably New York or Vermont.
His house is rustic and inviting
no gate, just a hand-painted peace sign out front
and a box that says free rhubarb, take some
a wrap-around porch and swing,
tasteful unpretentious curtains,
a happy chimney whispering out aromatic smoke,
and there’s always an apple pie
cooling on the window sill.
And so here I come now—
Yes! It’s me, fantasy Billy
smiling the smile of the successful
rolling up in my vintage
(but not gaudy)
’56 Chevrolet pickup
my dog Thoreau, a rescue of course, riding shotgun
manic chickens scattering crazily as I pull in.
You see,
I was in town, at the diner,
with Clem and Lefty and Cecil
sipping coffee and discussing
the high school football team’s prospects.
It’s fall—everything is beautiful.
My wife, who works with orphans,
has just come in from her pottery studio.
She kisses me and informs me
that my agent called and Harvard
wants to honor me again next month.
Oh how tiresome,
I say.
I’d rather play horseshoes with Clem.
But I go anyway.
Some wealthy hedge-fund alum
whose literary daughter has all my books
dispatches his pilot to fetch me.
He glides into our cow pasture at the appointed hour.
We don’t have cows any more,
too much work.
But it’s nice not having to drive to the airport.
I make my speech.
Everyone loves me.
At the reception afterward
as usual
some comely twenty-nine-year-old
grad student
her siren’s hand lightly on my lapel
lets me know just how much
my work has meant to her….
but I’m used to this by now
so it’s no trouble.
I’m such a great guy.
Back at my hotel suite
I toss off a quick
poem
for the New Yorker
and sleep soundly as always.
I even wear pajamas.
My children all work for Oxfam
and are expert mountain climbers.
I never need Viagra
my eyes are 20/20
my teeth so sound
the dentist has me visit
only once a year.
But sometimes…on quiet evenings
when I’m tinkering with the Chevy
(I call her Sylvia, after Sylvia Plath)
the Red Sox game quietly on the radio
I find myself wishing I lived in Santa Cruz…yes
in a musty studio apartment
with a decrepit cat who barfs violently on the carpet at four a.m.
it’s as though he’s trying to turn himself inside out for Christ’s sake
and neighbors whose high decibel, jack-hammer style love-making
comes and comes again hard through the cheap-ass half-inch sheet-rock wall
penetrating even the protective pillow I press to my beleaguered ears
and a voodoo smoke alarm with a freaking mind of its own
and a malevolent marauding murder of hoodlum crows
who seem to derive particular glee from shitting only on my car…
But that lasts about two seconds, tops
I shake my head, smiling sheepishly,
and I chuckle softly to my silly Billy self
switch off the light
and head upstairs to bed
to my extraordinary wife
and sleep like a fucking baby.
ANGRY PRIUS
God, do I want to go in the fast lane. Boy oh boy.
Look at them over there,
blithely zooming well over the limit, 75, 80, 85
—just booming down the blacktop like a rolling stampede of high-octane buffalo.
Why, that arrogant golden Hummer was doing 90 just a minute ago,
shimmering wasteful little droplets cascading recklessly from his gleaming dual