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
There’s an engine running in my head.
A Chevy Silverado.
It’s revving up.
I fasten the seat-belt.
Grab the wheel.
Don’t know where I’m going.
All I want to do
is rest on this mattress,
have pudgy dreams.
But it’s grown wheels
zooming along the highway
and all the road songs come on the radio
‘It’s a Wide Open Road’
‘On the Road Again’,
‘The Long and Winding Road’,
all my favorites,
how can a poor boy rest?
and I’m belting the songs out,
the wind winnowing my hair
twirling my kiss curl
like a lover’s finger
*pic courtesy of pinterest
Everything Small and Modest
Robert looks happy here.
Eyes lit up like lamps
full of wonder..
He is on one of his long walks
from the asylum,
He has spotted something.
Perhaps it is a wood pigeon
clearing its throat.
Or a song thrush balancing on a twig,
beak open ready to burst into song.
Everything small and modest
is pleasant and beautiful. Robert declared.
He looks dapper here, and in good health
certainly better that he did when he was found
dead in the snow that Xmas day in’ 56,
the photograph that ghouls pore over.
He didn’t write much in those last years
at the asylum , letting himself off the hook,
declaring, I am here to be mad, not to write.
.Shameless.
Part of me recoils.
What are you?
Shameless?
Milking sympathy.
No, I say, I’m not.
Though I’m doing something
just as shameless,
using the disease as grist
to the mill.
Isn’t that what writers do?
I am ferocious for new material,
for keeping the old war horse fed.
Should one take advantage of an illness
or submit meekly to it.?
*pic courtesy of Wiki Commons
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
I hope they pay the ferryman.
I hope they pay him good.
For all his journeyings. all his toing and froings,
miles notched, hours accrued.
over the last four days.
He is resting now.
ferry in dry dock.
It is a busy time of the year. but what do you do?
You do anything for yr kids.
I hope they pay the ferryman.
And they will. Ten fold.
With love and affection.
I want to cram everything in
everything
into the suitcase of life.
No wonder it’s so heavy
Travel lightly, Matt said during a session of morning meditation
and though I knew what he meant — shedding one’s addictions,
regrets, anger, all the pettiness that weighs us down,
I couldn’t help but applying it to food, how it’s easier to move
with grace and agility with less weight, foregoing that plate of chips,
that second glass of wine with steak and even a smaller portion
of eye fillet, but surely a slice of that yummy Orange Baby Cake
after gym wouldn’t hurt
John Malone 