first published in Misfit Magazine, Alan Catlin, ed.
William Taylor Jr., The People Are Like Wolves to Me, Roadside Press, roadsidefam.com distributed by Magical Jeep, also available on Amazon, 2025, 85 pages, $17.
If his poetry is to be taken literally, and there is no reason not to take him at his word, Taylor is a melancholy man. He prefers his own company to that of mass gatherings. Taylor feels a kindship with a few old drunks in a dive bar who are lost in the last days of their drinking themselves to death than he is in other public places where people, or worse, tourists, gather to gawk at the locals in their natural habitat. In a way these poems feel like a Jack Lodonesque, or Orwellian Down and Out descriptive testimony of life in the tenderloin district of San Francisco. Taylor isn’t abjectly poor, as are the people in London and Orwell’s books, but there is a boat load of loneliness and solitude for people failing to make human connections. There is also a sense of the absurd, a kind of quiet wry humor in Taylor’s observations. A recurring image is that of the “famous poet” whose self-assurance and blind allegiance to the wonderfulness of himself, only partially obscures the facile personality of someone whose ego is greater than his accomplishments. We don’t know exactly who this famous poet is but we know exactly what he is, a phony, the worst kind of phony, and he could be anyone.
Another recurring personality is the beautiful blonde bartender who feels vacuous in a way that only a woman who is as beautiful as she is, and knows it, can be. She is still young enough to have a heart and a curious mind, but ultimately, feels as if she is falling victim to her beauty and isn’t motivated to do anything about it. It’s so much easier to go with the flow than become a fully developed person.
An encounter with a woman causes hm to re-evaluate his opinion of Janis Joplin and he finds, despite himself, a certain kinship he previously paid no attention to. It isn’t life changing but it is amusing. Ultimately Taylor is not a depressive nor are his poems depressing. There is a thin red line between depression and loneliness/sadness and Taylor treads it carefully with a keen eye. There are broken hearts and lost loves, major disappointments along the way, but you don’t have to let your setbacks define or break you. Taylor certainly does not. The most emblematic poem for me in The People Are Like Wolves to Me is “In Search of It.” Having already established that the human condition appears to be all about people perceiving others having what they are looking for the sum up his feelings of life,
The people have failed me,
the government has failed me
I have failed myself.
All of which is commonplace,
but I’ve grown bitter with hope
forever tricking me
into mucking through it all
just to reach the next rotten thing.
Yet here I am in search of it
(from In Search of It)
Taylor has decided to stick around because he loves the sound of the rain, the feeling the warmth of the sun. He calls himself the Walt Whitman of End Times and he might well be.
