Griffin’s poems are filled with transients and life on the road, many motorcycles, cars, big rigs, buses, hitchhikers and highways—so many one-night stays in boarding houses and cheap hotels—and a hovering of violence and death, with a pervasive loneliness and longing seeping through it all, especially for the lost past. Several poems are about the father he never saw. In Heritage, he writes: "We swim together / where mirrors meet / and even the fish are cold." Malcolm Glass, the judge who selected Griffin's Western Flyers for the Panhandler Chapbook Series, compares Griffin's darkness and focus on death to Yeats. Glass says that Griffin's darkness "is not depressing" because his "delight in language well-crafted infuses [his poems] with life." Glass also notes that narrators of Griffin's poems try to hold onto the past only to discover that it is always elusive.
