It Must Be, an E-book of poems by John Michael Flynn

 

The book can be ordered here from Overdrive: https://www.overdrive.com/publishers/flight-delay-books

Or here from Barnes and Noble UK: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/it-must-be-john-michael-flynn/1145041103?ean=2940179633884

Conceived as a companion to my collection Elsewhere A While, the poems in It Must Be were compiled from an assemblage of notebooks I'd started in my twenties.

Sorting through them served as a way for me to look back at both where and what I've been, who I am now, where I may be going. 

The title comes from  a quotation I came across in a book about Beethoven. Translated from the German, it's a phrase he expressed, allegedly with exasperation, while working at his piano on one of his symphonies.

Muss es sein? Es muss sein! 

Must it be? It must be!

Ludwig Van Beethoven

The book is presented in four parts, one for each season of the year, each with approximately the same amount of poems.

Table Of Contents

I.

Someone Has Walked Again

A Round Theme Cages The Air

Mind The Gnomes

Please Don’t Park On My Ankles

A Toast To Toast

Expect And Fall

History Will Assist

My Jefferson Dreams

Refuge On The Highway

Baroque Aspirations

II.

Time-Ravaged Face

In Response To The Narrative

Whatever This Importance

Fine Air

Sky Greens

Forgot The Password

The Anteater

Tweet Monger

Have To Call In Sick

Long Drive 

Six-Fingered Glove

Election Year Anxiety

Possible Solutions

Abandoned Dreams

Inadmissible Evidence

Speaking As One Of A Couple

Fetching And Eccentric

III.

What Am I Missing?

Bog Standard

Virtue Common As Dirt

Irritable

First Day Of School

Brutal Compassion

Enough With Grime And Ridicule

Arid

The Sideman

Self-Deception

Not Born As Stone

Conviction

Fob On A Chain

Sick To Death Of The Race Hustle

Get Famous Inside Their Heads, Kid

Essential Needs

Faulty Spindle

Gutted

IV.

Only Rust Gives A Damn About Spengler

Elegy For John Woods

For Signore Primo

Such A Joust To Define Any Language

Three Questions

Judee Kutter Riot Grrrl

Fearless And Indestructible

Newly Wed

The Carmen Miranda Copacabana Banana

Perduto Significato

Keys

Psychoacoustic Reinvention

To My Angel This I Offer

Night Sweats And Death Mothers

Here below is one poem from the collection. 

Time-Ravaged Face

Beautiful because it speaks the truth.

And truth always reveals pain. 

It does not shame us.

I love a knife only if it will kill me.

I listen to neighbors whine about schedules. 

I understand their grief and urgency. 

When you’re in debt, the time is always now.

And we are all in debt.