I Wish I Was Billy Collins: Poems by Pete McLaughlin

By Pete McLaughlin

Part standup comedy, part painfully revealing self-exploration, this is a tender, heartbreaking, hilarious book of poems about the male condition in the 21st Century.

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.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wellstone Books
• Release date: Dec 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9780960061563

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.

Book preview

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