You’ve just had two hours of chemo
and an injection of white blood cells.
And you’re jumping out of yr skin
Where’s the party ? you say.
Where’s the party?
But there’s no party.
There’s only the house meeting.
That will do, you say.
You can turn that into a party.
The One No One Wanted.
It was the one no one wanted
The last one on the shelf
The one no one wanted, I didn’t
Much want it myself.
But there were no others
So I had little choice
The one that all had shunned
I purchased myself.
And Oh it fitted the bill
To the nth degree
So the one no one wanted
Was the right one for me.
*pic pinterest
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 had just unzipped at the left urinal when he took the one next to me, even though the one on the right was vacant.
We were shoulder to shoulder. We were that close.
He had bright orange hair like Mick Hucknall from Simply Red.
I hummed a few bars of “If You Don’t Know Me By Now’ just in case but there was nothing.
Hi, I’m Charlie, he offered.
Umm, I’m John. We don’t have to shake hands do we?
No, of course not, he said. You come here often.
Only to pee, I said. How about you?
Yes, much the same.
Then we both entered the zone, quietly exuding, self satisfied sighs.
We must stop meeting like this, I said wryly.
Then he zipped up and went to the basin and when he had gone I did the same.
This does not happen to me often. In fact, it was the first time which is why I’m writing about it.
Weird, huh ?
I promise to corroborate, she says
behind the blue curtain.
I promise to corroborate.
Good, the male voice says, then keep still.
She does but her mouth doesn’t.
Any minute now she’ll mention the condescension running down the windows of her van and I’ll try to suppress a snigger,
but just then the doc comes in and injects me behind the blue curtain.
Jeez, I say. I felt that.
Sorry, he says, and you’re bleeding.
But I rally coz that’s what a man poet’s supposed to do.
It’s nothing, I say as I look at it, kind of mesmerized. It’s like that song says.
What song?
You know, Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls. ‘Sometimes you bleed just to know you’re alive’.
.
Look, she says. There are two moons tonight. Do you think that means anything?
Like end times, you mean?
I don’t know, she says. It can’t be good.
We move closer. There they are above the rooftops, one higher and to the right of the other.
Someone in the ranch-style house across the road switches the porch light on and joins us.
My ex phoned, he says. She saw it too. She’s bit of a sky watcher.
So we stand there out the front as one disc, then the other veer off in a north-easterly direction, silent as full moons.
You need a hard hat
a hard hat to go in
dismantling the enigma of existence
is a dangerous thing
the ceiling may collapse on you
the walls cave in
punishing your arrogance
the plumbing dislodge spewing
its putrescence over you.
You’ve messed with the masonry.
You need a hard hat
a hard hat to go in
to write poetry
*photo from Pinterest by Kristopher King
Forgive me. I am not myself today.
I wasn’t myself yesterday either.
To tell you the truth, I’m really uncertain whether I will be myself tomorrow.
Or the next day. Or the next.
Where I’ve gone to, I just don’t know.
I have informed the police, the Missing Person’s Bureau.
They have put out an all points alert.
I take time off work.
I go looking for myself in bars, parks, in shopping malls.
I take photographs of myself to show them what I looked like.
Ugly bastard, someone quips.
Go easy, I say. He’s not a bad bloke once you get to know him.
The rest shake their heads sadly.
I go home, hang my hat on the rack and sit down morosely on the old lounge.
Ahh, there you are, I say, almost sitting on top of me.
I was here all along, he says. Where have YOU been?
.Look, she says. Look. There are two moons tonight. Do you think that means anything?
Like end times, you mean?
I don’t know, she says. It can’t be good.
We move closer. There they are above the rooftops, one higher and to the right of the other.
Someone in the ranch-style house switches the porch light on and joins us.
My ex-wife phoned, he says. She saw it too. She’s bit of a sky watcher.
So we stand there out the front as one then the other veer off in a north-easterly direction, silent and glowing as moons.
For nights and nights and nights I lay on my pillow, worrying, listening to the rain, even though the skies were clear and starlit and the moon shone through my window like a lantern and I wondered what else I was hearing that wasn’t there or not hearing that was until one day I had my ears syringed with warm water and the wax flowed out in little honey-coloured clumps into a dish the nurse held for me and I no longer heard it rain except when it did.
John Malone 