Sometimes when I’m driving along
the window down, wind winnowing my hair,
the sun giving me the thumbs up,
I break out in spontaneous whoops of joy.
No, I don’t have Tourette’s.
I haven’t won the Lottery.
I’m just laughing zebra happy,
turning cartwheels happy,
walking on my hands happy.
It’s infectious. I whoop some more.
You wouldn’t want to be a passenger.
Neanderthal.
You know how you get scrambled eggs, right ?
Well I had scrambled dreams.
I forgot my meds. That was the trouble.
All my dreams were Neanderthal.
Batty, belly up, R Rated.
My Id running amuck.
Skeletons spilling out of the closet.
Onto the sidewalk.
Under the lamp-post
where passersby could gawk.
It was one of those nights.
Sometimes my poems are cluttered with adverbs and adjectives,
subjunctive clauses, desultory detours like this front yard is overgrown
with weeds. When my poems gets like this. when you can’t see the structure,
it is time to bring out the whipper snipper. Time for a trim.
The last thing I do at night
before hitting the sack
is taking a peek,
and the first thing I do in the morning
after getting up
is to sneak another peek.;
the laptop is left on
so I can see at a glance
how many comments I’ve collected
since I last looked;
sometimes I go away with a full tummy,
other times I leave anxious,
afraid I failed to hit the mark,
the old lead balloon syndrome.
I know it’s unhealthy,
it’s not all about numbers
but it’s the performer in me—
you like to hear the applause,
& read the critics in the morning
something psychedelic
I went looking for the dark side of the moon ’cause Dino told me it was good. If you can’t think of the name, think Pink Floyd, he said but I didn’t need to do that. I went to all the outlets in my area, but none had it: they thought I was having them on. So I drove to Dan Murphy’s ’cause they have everything. I looked for something psychedelic but there was nothing. Finally an attendant found it. It had some dumb ass, low key label. I took it home. I did not guzzle. I sipped. I savoured. Then something happened ….
You could have knocked me over with an albatross
when I heard that four off-kilter waltzes I was listening to
were by Samuel Coleridge Taylor. Hang on, I thought,
my favourite Romantic poet [ sorry Wordsworth] whom
I studied at Uni, who wrote one of the great lyric narratives
of all time, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ was also
a classical composer? How did this just become known?
Did he moonlight as a musician, did he snuggle up
to the great composers of his time? But then the announcer,
as if reading my mind, clarified that the composer was
Samual Coleridge Taylor whom his mother named after
the great poet. After I calmed my farm, I settled back
and listened to more of Samuel C.
I sometimes wonder who he was, that man who called at our place a few years after dad had died and mum had moved into a nursing home.
Did mum have a secret life?
We all need someone or something to keep us afloat.
Another soggy morning
I text my love
on the third day of rain
who likes to receive
cheery aubades.
Try squeezing some goodness
out of this one, I say
as the clothes look bedraggled
on the line
sodden, sorry smiles.
It’s La Nina, I say
you’ll have to stay out there
a little longer.
F**k La Nina,
my ripped jeans snarl.
They always had an attitude problem.
I want to cram everything in
everything
into the suitcase of life.
No wonder it’s so heavy
John Malone 