Last Dance.
Look at them skedaddle along the sidewalk
like runaways, dash across the boulevard,
full of beans, reckless as buccaneers,
realizing perhaps this could be
their last dance
before Winter
closes the whole show down.
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.
Jelly Cakes.
They were called jelly cakes and they melted in yr mouth.
Marge brought them for Ted’s birthday.
Baked them herself.
What a whizz.
They were cheery and cherry coloured like Xmas.
No need to scrabble around for words to describe the taste like you do for wine.
One word would do.
One syllable.
Yum.
Before I met her
I always laughed at cartoons
alone,
was astonished before paintings & poems
privately;
but now
five years later
I pass the magazine to her,
the one with the crazy cartoons.
Look at this, I say, & she does and smiles
Span our faces & rumble our bellies
like little laughing Buddhas;
Trouble shared is trouble halved,
my mother used to say — but Joy
Works inversely:
It is doubled when spent with another.
John Malone 