Selected Works, John Guzlowski

 

Kafka and Me at Starbucks

He scratches on a notepad

And I ask him what he’s writing.

Nothing, he says, just some words.

Blue, lunch, Mildred, faith, and love.

Why these words? I ask.

He looks at me and smiles and says

For a writer, you ask too many questions.

Kafka on War

Let me tell you

What you already know. 

Man is a beast.

Look at him 

standing next to you.

One minute 

He’s laughing.

The next he’s eating 

your mother’s 

Tits and belly.

All you can do

Is shoot him.

Then have some coffee

And a donut.

You’ll feel better.

Kafka Alone at Starbucks

Kafka sits at the table 

drinking coffee 

He wonders 

why it's so quiet here 

He remembers all the coffee

He ever drank

and stirs the star of words

into the cup

Kafka Pauses

Kafka waits by the door.

There’s something on the other side.

He can hear it.

A breath. A scratch. 

A foot moving back and forth

Almost as it were dancing.

He wants to open the door.

But he’s enjoying the fear too much.

If he opens the door, 

The fear will scatter like a cat.

Kafka and God

Kafka passes the temple,

Wonders what he’d do 

If he were God for a day.

He knows he would drink

More coffee and eat

A bigger piece of pie.

Kafka’s favorite song?

It was California Dreaming,

though he never heard it.  

He died before John and Michelle 

ever wrote it, even before 

they were born, but Kafka knew 

the song, the cold that wouldn’t stop, 

the church a Jew could never enter.  

The sense of a gray street 

that leads nowhere.

Over a writing career that spans more than 40 years, John Guzlowski has amassed a significant body of published work in a wide range of genres: poetry, prose, literary criticism, reviews, fiction and nonfiction.

His poems and stories have appeared in such national journals as North American Review, Ontario Review, Rattle, Chattahoochee Review, Atlanta Review, Nimrod, Crab Orchard Review, Marge, Poetry East, Vocabula Review. He was the featured poet in the 2007 edition of Spoon River Poetry Review. Garrison Keillor read Guzlowski’s poem “What My Father Believed” on his program The Writers Almanac.