The Things I’ve Heard about It.
It is a cancer.
It is not a cancer.
You will not die from it.
You will die with it.
It is the cancer you want to have
if you have to have a cancer.
It is indolent. Lazy.
And that strange name.
Long as the name of a Welsh railway station.
Waldenstrom macroglobulinaneamia.
Try saying that in one breath.
Whew.
Maybe it was the Meds.
Maybe it was the meds
but I felt a little trippy
so when the nurse leaned over and said.
we’ll give your cannula a good flush in a minute
I said, O wow! It’s been a long time since I’ve had my cannula flushed
& the room broke up.
Rhianna and Jacob joined in the fun.
It was that kind of treatment room.
Don’t worry.
We all have our heads screwed on
but with the lids a little open
to let the silly in.
Was it worth it?
Hell, yeah.
I got to drive during JJJ’s hottest 100 of 2022..
Got to hear the First Nation’s cover of Cold Play’s ‘Yellow’,
a wild, gritty banger
by King Stingray
the didgeridoo barking like camp-dogs.
Eat your heart out, Chris Martin.
I got to see a quilt of sparrows whirring across a blue denim sky
in a 45 degree tilt.
Wild and acrobatic.
Most of all I got to break free,
like those sparrows,
like King Stingray
tearing it up for freedom, togetherness
like the house parties all across the nation on this special day
with forty more tracks still to go,
and I’m in my car,
one part of me driving, the other dancing to the beats.
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
K’s fond of haiku,
Michael senryu, its jokey cousin;
Mia, ‘a struggling author’ writes tiny tales,
Richard American sentences,
put them together,
and what have you got?
a slim, selection
of shorts,
a breviary of brevities
a pocket book of poems
for the wee small hours
We are sitting across from each other
trying not to stare
looking down at our phones.
There are some paintings on the wall
but no one is looking at them.
Perhaps they are the sort of paintings
that are not meant to be looked at
but are there to establish a presence,
maintain a mood.
Then I notice the paintings,
half figurative, half abstract
in faded denim blue
with black, springy squiggles
like a cat’s whiskers
are not signed.
Perhaps the painter was half abstracted
when he painted them
& simply forgot.
Hiding Place.
Was wondering where the cat snoozed sunny afternoons
when I turned the hose on some groggy –looking gardenias
in a cloistered corner of the yard
and found out
as a cat bounded out of the bushes into the clearing
as if she were scalded
Greedy Gubbins.
I want to get up.
I want to see how much my eyes
have swollen,
want to see Kokki dash across the court
in his tiger shorts after his prey,
want to see those arum lilies again
trumpet their hosannas to orange,
want another pod coffee
another shot of Bailey’s
just a thimble full
but my partner sees me passing by.
You should rest your eyes, she says and I say,
too much to see,
and I know what she’s about to say
even before she says it:
my mummy would have called you,
a Greedy Gubbins, she’ll say
and then she says it,
Ouch!
Kiss Curl .
I love the way the wind
plays with my hair
when I whisk along the road
windows wound down
twirls my comb-over
into a kiss curl
like Bill Hayley in the fifties.
Rock around the clock, baby.
*pic courtesy of pinterest
Surly.
Bono looks surly.
Putting him beside a book called ‘Euphoria’
did it.
Bono feels anything but.
Euphoric, that is.
He’s been languishing on the Express Shelf
for three weeks
while books all around him have been flying
off the shelf.
‘Pissed’ is closer to the mark
as in ‘Pissed off’.
Bono is not used to this sort of treatment.
I would take him home myself
but I already have.
If the book was as lean and finely crafted
as a U2 song
it’d be different.
But it is as bloated as a Pynchon novel.
Please Don’t Stare.
It’s not as bad as the horns
on Hellboy’s head
even when filed down to stubs
or the protrusions
on Elephant Man’s face
or that raspberry stain the shape of Africa
on the barista’s cheek that day in the mountains
but the volcanic cone,
a miniature Vesuvius,
on my forehead
is an eye popper
and looks like it’s about
to go off.
John Malone 