Mystic Mauve.
I’m eight miles high again, sweet Jesus
branded on my feet
been smoking that purple rain again
though I have no one to meet
in the jingle jangle morning
mauve shadows are forming
& I’m running out of time
still tryin’ to catch the wind, sweet Mary
still one toke over the line
I’ve been having parties
in the top right hand corner of my head
where the music throbs incessantly
and civility is dead
have another drink , one says
I don’t mind if I do
and the hunchback pounds on the old piano
till well past half two
a bulky fist hammers the door
Joe sent for me, he yells
& a smokey eyeball peers out
is this heaven or is this hell?
I wouldn’t mind so much
take less of a dim view
if due courtesies were observed
& I were invited too
Under the influence
I wrote copiously
From midnight to morning
Dementedly
A devil held my hand
An accomplice flayed my side
My mind had an erection
It could not hide
All my past spilled out
From the attic of my mind
My pen swept it up
I was writing blind.
Such dark energy
Flowed through me
and out through my fingers
its estuary.
* have you ever been driven to write in the middle of the night that took hours?
I could go for a walk but I can’t be buggered.
I could check my Facebook status but I can’t be buggered.
I could cut back the bush near the letter box so the postie can chuff past more easily on his motor scooter.
But I can’t be buggered.
I could put more effort in getting my next manuscript together — the editor is interested — but I can’t be buggered doing that either.
I almost can’t be buggered writing this poem about not being buggered.
Would rather curl up in the sun out the back with a good crime novel and lose myself in the plot.
You open your mouth. A pink hippo comes out. You scratch your ear, a purple gorilla. You blow your nose, a polka dot egret. You pass wind, an emerald marmoset. You wonder what will come next. You go to the toilet. You piss piranhas. Defecate falcons. Can I have some more you ask the anaesthetist but the anaesthetist has gone, the effects wearing off just as an oleaginous eel slithers from the long wound in your leg from which the surgeon removed veins for your blocked arteries.
Only when I noticed
The rusty red rat rubbing its rump
Against the end of the bed
Did I cut down on
The painkillers; though the pterodactyl
With the one jaundiced eye
thrashing its wings
Against the latticed windows didn’t
Help much either.
A rusty red rat
Rubbing its rump against the railings:
No more painkillers
John Malone 