Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only €10,99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    I Wish I Was Billy Collins: Poems by Pete McLaughlin
    I Wish I Was Billy Collins: Poems by Pete McLaughlin
    I Wish I Was Billy Collins: Poems by Pete McLaughlin
    Ebook131 pages1 hour

    I Wish I Was Billy Collins: Poems by Pete McLaughlin

    By Pete McLaughlin

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    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.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWellstone Books
    Release dateDec 8, 2020
    ISBN9780960061563
    I Wish I Was Billy Collins: Poems by Pete McLaughlin
    Author

    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.

    Related to I Wish I Was Billy Collins

    Related ebooks

    Humor & Satire For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Travels With Cleo

      Jan 27, 2022

      Travels With Cleo
      9 min read

    • Article

      TEN POEMS Translations of Rafael Alberti

      May 1, 2024

      Throughout the centuries,through the nothingness of the world,I, without sleep, search for you. Behind me, imperceptible,without touching my shoulders,my dead angel keeps watch. Where is Paradise,Shadow, you who have been there?I ask silently. Cities

      3 min read

    • Article

      Encountering Seamus Heaney

      Nov 1, 2024

      Encountering Seamus Heaney
      25 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Nov 1, 2022

      Each morningwakingamidst the not-ever-before,dressing inside the not-ever-again. Under sunlight or cloud,brushing the hair. Not yet arrivedat the end-crimped finish,drinking coffeeand buttering toast. Permitted to slip into coat, into shoes,I go out,

      1 min read

    • Article

      On Constellation Route

      Sep 1, 2022

      KAVEH AKBAR This book is built around the epistolary form, these letters from you to friends, futures, cockroaches, your radiator, William Shatner. And then there are also these letters to you, many of them actually poems to you, written by friends.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Another Look at Thom Gunn

      Dec 1, 2019

      Another Look at Thom Gunn
      12 min read

    • Article

      From ESTRANGEMENT

      May 1, 2022

      From ESTRANGEMENT
      4 min read

    • Article

      Poetics Of Uncertainty

      May 1, 2022

      KATE A poem I keep returning to in your book [Path of Totality] is “Urine Season.” It ends with the lines: “Some will say this is not a poem for them. But I say it’s a poem for anyone who ever expected anything.” “Urine Season” is about the loss of y

      9 min read

    • Article

      A Flash of Genius

      Jun 1, 2022

      A Flash of Genius
      8 min read

    • Article

      Jude the Obscure

      Jun 1, 2023

      When I was fifteen, I took up Hardy's Jude the Obscure—a mismatch. But there were these two sentences, page 34, I remember, of the Signet Classic paperback edition: Somebody might have come along that way… to tell him that his ideas were more advance

      1 min read

    • Article

      Emerson And Thoreau Led A Second Independence Movement – This Time Of Thought

      Dec 8, 2021

      In 1976, Robert A. Gross published “The Minutemen and Their World,” a groundbreaking piece of scholarship about the origins of the American Revolution. Rather than telling the story through accounts of a few Founding Fathers, Gross dramatically broad

      3 min read

    • Article

      Gall

      Jun 1, 2023

      Catbirds clawing at the ruby drupes of viburnum, and bouncing the boughs as the great heat squats over us and crickets sandpaper sunlight in the bristling meadow. We are not lost. We're just quiet. If we don't speak, it's not that we have nothing to

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Element of Silence: The Millions Interviews N. Scott Momaday

      Jul 20, 2022

      "Too many people just write down things in haste that look like poetry, but they’re not." The post The Element of Silence: The Millions Interviews N. Scott Momaday appeared first on The Millions.

      9 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2023

      There was a family of deer that looked something like us.They traveled far with a fierce sense of collective unity.Held their fearless faces absent of cosmic worry, for the most part.And yet something crept in, making the easiest partof being togethe

      9 min read

    • Article

      Strange As The Rules Of Grammar

      Dec 7, 2021

      The two or three times I saw Lil Waynehanging out at the Praline Connection in New Orleans he had a mouth full of blingcovered in forkfuls of greens or green beans or white rice & red beans on a tongueof strange lucrative grammar The answer will be t

      1 min read

    • Article

      Three Triple Sonnets

      Jan 1, 2024

      Rosebud asks me if I can just take the moneyand run when I tell her about the Sugar Daddiesof Instagram™ hitting me up, taking me backto my mid-twenties in Tempe, Arizona whenall the single dads of the neighborhood wouldtry to come into my yard—into

      4 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jul 1, 2023

      Jester-necked pile of ideasfattening by the cutting board.I have known the summer wall,it says slowly. The hillside facessouth into the valley.Dew on the tomato plants.Anything that grows, swarms,bunches itself against a stayand cannot stay. The vine

      4 min read

    • Article

      from BLACK PASTORAL

      Nov 1, 2023

      somewheres, some lifetimes ago I have run so far, so long.There is nowhere I haven’t beenBut here, in this field, a bodyLength from the ragged brinkThat gives way to forest.I collapsed here, the thin, hard slipOf me whittled at both ends.I want badly

      4 min read

    • Article

      On Giving Up: Its Uses And Benefits In The Writing Life

      Jul 1, 2022

      It reminds me of a moment I used to have in college. I’d put off my term papers every single time till the last minute. So I’d be up at 3 or 4 in the morning working on some damn thesis totally confused, completely exhausted, and I’d have this glorio

      14 min read

    • Article

      Even Considering

      Jun 1, 2024

      Even Considering
      4 min read

    • Article

      Quarantine Morning

      Dec 7, 2021

      Climbing the stairs, slowly, on my palmsand soles, bent far forward, I seemy shins closer than usual—their indigo and red-violet fireworks,their royal-blue wormholes—how much difference is there, anymore,between me and a cadaver?I know I won’t come,

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Click And The Wink

      Sep 1, 2024

      I’ve been circling the idea of writing about mentors for a long time. The title came to me right away, but the rest proved harder, proved all but unwritable. Not that I didn’t try. Not that I didn’t make stab after stab at it. The title, “The Click a

      27 min read

    • Article

      Former Agent Says, 'Border Patrol Does Good Work ... But There's Tension There'

      Feb 6, 2018

      In The Line Becomes a River, Francisco Cantú looks back on his time as a Border Patrol agent. He says, in his experience, "No matter what obstacle we put at the border, it's going to be subverted."

      3 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Sep 1, 2023

      I am walking through the hotelEvery time I am so sadThat I want to die It’s a place where I can keepEverything I’ve never beenBrave enough to get to Poets have moons and moneyTo get themselves throughThe longest night imaginable But I’ve had these ro

      3 min read

    • Article

      Deadlines

      Dec 16, 2020

      Four prizes of $500 each and publication in the Paris Review Daily are given annually for a group of poems. Winners also receive lodging and travel expenses to give a reading at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. Poets who have not yet published a f

      21 min read

    • Article

      I Wish I’d Known…

      May 7, 2020

      ‘When I set about becoming a novelist, for seven years I wrote unpublishable twaddle that has me cringing to think of it now. ‘There are two things I dearly wish I’d known. ‘The first is that most good novels are fiction, not disguised autobiography.

      1 min read

    • Article

      To Hell And Back

      Sep 1, 2022

      The first complete English translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy appeared in 1802, and over the past two centuries, new versions have proliferated beyond count, like Beatles covers or Sherlock Holmes movies. A diverting literary parlor game is to imag

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for I Wish I Was Billy Collins

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      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

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1