I Don’t Remember

I don’t remember
ecstasy
the summer loves
and winter tragedies
softly spoken promises
and bitter recrimination
.
I don’t remember
you
any of you
partners in crimes
too sweet to resist
.
I don’t remember
wounds
carved by bloody lies
and broken promises
or the hand
that wielded the knife
.
I don’t remember
.

Something’s Coming

Sshh,

Something’s coming…

Something’s coming

From a long way off

Bury your head

Plough a new furrow

Cultivate a little distance

From the past

.

Kissing God

“Smoking this stuff is like kissing God”. Hyperbole, he did a good line in embroidery. Of course, the stuff was lethal – laced with DMT – Happy times spread across my face like the warmth of the morning sun and unfolded in my lap in a royal flush. 

I swam where the dolphins swam and ran where the children ran. I found the place where all the dreamers came from. I was as light as the breeze, as helpless as a child. I wouldn’t leave a ripple if you dropped me in the ocean. “See the little crystals? That’s the magic right there, in them crystals.” So he thought; the magic was in us – in the forms reflected in those crystals  – one of which was divine.

.

The Biggest Lie

You was the giant killer
Big chief of the Zulus
You was a hard man
King of the Hoodoos
Your word was law
Your name was God
But you’re the biggest lie
That has ever been told
.

Mute

I dreamed that they banned music and silence softly ate at our minds and infiltrated our hearts until we were made of nothing but emptiness. Our voices contained no lyricism, or colour. Our thoughts contained no conflict, or wonder. Even our faces gave up and died – their blank countenances conveyed neither happiness nor pain, their egoless expressions were one and the same. A world without music was a world without tears, a world without laughter. A world without music was like a play without actors.

.

Image ‘Mute’ by Maya Kulenovic

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Brompton’s

Squeeze me a Brompton’s and blow my joint while I eat this bird. I have a hard on for the kind of high only a hard shot of junk provides. My old man got tarred for drinking this bug juice, but I don’t care about tar – it’s the feathers I object to. I’ll blow my own brains out before I let anyone turn me into a chicken.

Those cold-blooded bastards down at the lizard house have it in for dissenters who sup God’s own from the crystal cup. They incarcerate anyone who jacks up or spreads a little green on his lungs. Their war on drugs is a futile exercise in enforced conformity. The pressures of the market lead to standardisation and the ubiquity of mediocrity.

Prohibition only causes the criminality that keeps the law enforcers in business. Everyone is a would-be snitch. Everybody is an enforcer trying to gun us down in a hail of psychic bullets. Pour me another baby; I’ve come over all terminal. I need to cradle my consciousness in velvet gloves.

.

Leave Me Be

My spring is wound
Way too tight
I’m on the fight or flight
The roaches beneath my skin 
Are threatening to do me in
I’ve reached a certain velocity
It’s an animal ferocity
.
I can’t sit still
I think I’m ill
I pace the floor
Make for the door
But out or in
I’m stuck on a pin
I can’t get free
Just let me be
.
I’m rotating left then right
There is no peace in sight
I’m spinning like a top
I don’t think I can stop
I’m struggling for breath
I might catch my death
.
I can’t sit still
I think I’m ill
I pace the floor
Make for the door
But out or in
I’m stuck on a pin
I just can’t get free
So please let me be
.

Fungaloid

Travel me
Unravel me
Baffle me
Turn me out

Fix me with a fungal crown

Pump it in
Pour it out
Rub it on
Inhale – exhale
Spark it up
Snuff it out
Skin it back
Tear it down

Anoint my head

With manna from heaven
Spike me upward
Drag me down
Ball my lightning
Take me under
Turn me on
Turn me around
Innovate
With my confusion
Make me whole
If not holy
Bake me outside
In the sun
.

My Old Man

Meat and two veg
On a formica table
Jim Reeves and distant drums
Twenty Kensitas Club
An ashtray full of dog ends
India Pale Ale and glass of rum
Plastic teeth in a grimace
The smell of Brylcream
A splash of Old Spice
And a clout round the lug
Tailored suits immaculate
And cuban heeled boots
Off to see a man about a dog
He was hard as nails
My old man
.

Paint Me Yellow

Sodium yellow
The colour of caffeine
Paints the street
And invades my room
My nights are long
Measured in solitude
The world is sleeping
But there’s no peace
For the wicked
And I am wicked
So turn me over
And paint me yellow
I have hours to wait
Before the dawn
.

Noah

Noah built an ark

He was thinking of the future

I built myself a raft

I was thinking of myself

.

Stranger

left to the mercy of the weather god
drenched in the rhythmic rain
a man – a foreigner perhaps
dark and curly – straight and bent
is lost in the open country
he carries the casts of his funeral face
and the relics of fallen saints
always a stranger – stranger than life
he quarries great stones of remembrance
once he was this – once he was that
now an alien in these parts
.