I want to cram everything in
everything
into the suitcase of life.
No wonder it’s so heavy
Cram
travel
Travel Lightly
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
Where Are You?
So where are you?
In a galaxy far far away.
No. Where are you really?
Tralfamadore.
Isn’t that where …?
Yes, where Billy Pilgrim went.
That time traveller from ‘Slaughterhouse Five’?
Yes, he went there on his days off.
His days off? From where?
Reality. Reality bites, you know.
But what if you never came back?
Like Hugh Conway in ‘Lost Horizons’? Dorothy in Oz ?
Yes.
Would it really matter? You’d be where you want to be. Would you even want to go back?
Have you a favourite fantasy place ? Which fantasy world would you live in if you could? What if you couldn’t come back?
The Best Exotic Mongolian Beanie
What sort of wuss wears a beanie around the house?
It’s not Outer Mongolia for fuck’s sake.
And I do have the heater on.
But it does look exotic and its warm and woolly.
A tower of a hat from Ulaanbaatar, the trader tells me.
I had to have it with its burnished reds and browns and its black leopard spots.
But I look a proper Charlie wearing it in the mall or library or on public transport.
In restaurants people just stare.
So I wear it in the yard when I’m gardening or evening walks along the esplanade before disappearing into my yurt
where I cuddle with a copy of Sonomyn Udval’s ‘Collected Short Stories’
The Lady in the Glove Box
When I wait for her to do a spot of shopping
I wait in the car.
When she’s getting ready to go out,
I wait in the driveway, the sun
like a lamp. with my stash of magazines
between the seats:
my New Yorkers, National Geographics
and that lady in the glove box,
Olive Kitteridge.
It is my loo, my library, my study,
My five-seated reading room,
My Chapman’s Homer.
My car really takes me places.
You’re my Oxycontin
You’re my Oxycontin
My Valium
My Iron Jack
My slug of Scotch
My Gin & Tonic
My second glass of red
My six-pack of beer
My magic board that surfs over anxiety & tedium
Just the thing for a long flight
my paperback of Tim Winton’s ‘Breath’
A Dog’s Paw-pose
Each morning when
The sun
Blooms overhead
They set out for
a walk
The shih-tzu &
the snowy-haired
lady he has
on a short leash.
He knows the way
like the back
of his own paw.
Big Bad Bus
I’m on a bus, he said. It’s like that bus in ‘Speed’. It can never stop. It can’t slow down. It can’t pick up passengers. It tears through the countryside in a purple blur. You don’t get a chance to take it in. There’s no such thing as a ‘breather’. There are no rest stops. The driver never sleeps. You’re more hostage than passenger. I’m on a bus, he said. And the bus is me.
Lop-Sided Moon
The bus shelter at the end of our street grinds its teeth at night.
Sometimes I sit with it, hold its hand, listen to its tale
of drunks and suicides,
of lycanthropes baying at the full moon,
of lonesome Lotharios weeping in their fists
I talk to it too about my problems
Of the jig-saw days when pieces don’t fit
Of the times when your heart races
Like a wildebeest on the veldt
But latches onto nothing.
After a while we both settle
and I head off home
beneath a lopsided moon.
Roads
The great roads do not have them:
The Road Less Travelled,
The Yellow Brick Road,
The Road to Damascus.
Nor the vinyl ones:
John Denver’s ‘Country Roads’,
‘The Highway to Hell’,
The Beatles’ ‘The Long and Winding Road’.
Only the lesser roads have them:
The pot-holed, crumbling ones,
The ones we have to travel:
Road Works.
John Malone 