Amped,
It’s terrible when you’re amped
and don’t know why
or worse still
don’t know what to do with it.
You could go for a run
get all hot & sweaty
but you’d need to shower afterwards
for that appointment with the oncologist.
So you sit here on the chair
feet madly tapping
while you keyboard this stuff
onto the page.
It’s gotta be good for something.
Like that ‘Guide For Anchoresses’ [c 1230] says:
‘The heart is a full wild beast
and maketh many wild leaps’,
More Hadron Collider.
More Hadron Collider than Merry-Go Round
thoughts race around
the beam pipes
of my mind
near the speed of light.
If I close my eyes
I can make out
the blur
little flibbertigibbets speed talking
at each other
colliding in bursts of light
a few of which end up
as poems.
pic courtesy of Wikicommons
Woozy.
It only lasted a few seconds
but I felt woozy as a drunk
a first timer on a passenger ship
riding a bumpy sea.
Whoa! I said, gripping the reins tighter
but the doc was concerned:
What is it, John? What’s happening?
My vision’s all over the place, doc.
Hang on, he said, taking my blood pressure,
feeling my pulse.
All good, he declared. Just rest for a few minutes here
till it settles.
I did. It did.
Boy! it was scary but sort of exhilarating too
like that time Marilyn Monroe
looked at herself in a fun house mirror
back in the fifties.
A Little Bit of Astral Traveling.
My body’s telling me to eat chocolate, dark chocolate.
I used to drink a red which Dino recommended called ‘Dark Side
of the Moon’ and do a bit of astral traveling between sips but my nose
kept running so I had to give it up.
I don’t know why but my nose runs when I pee. I went to see
my urologist but he told me to stop wasting his time.
Maybe there’s a message there.
A carrier pigeon dropped by the other day with a note between
his beak. It said, your house is burning
so I rushed outside to the honeysuckle hedge and read the good book
till the flames simmered down.
When I simmer down I’ll stop writing nonsense like this
but hey! I’m just doing what Spike used to do
& let the silly in.
Him !
when Cousin Lymon
leapt
on the back of Miss Amelia
during her fight with Henry Macy, her vicious ex
she felt the
sting
of betrayal —
she took the hunchback in;
like Jesus
when Judas pointing
said
“Him!”
*pic courtesy of pinterest
.Drifting, Just drifting.
I could sprinkle cinnamon sugar
over the cereal.
That’d be different.
Then I hear the monster outside
clawing the window
flaunting its fecundity.
I drop everything.
Mark can’t come to the 9th
so its up to me.
I dash outside in my pj’s
Spider-man socks and slippers
& I dove into it
bashing, slashing, lopping,
limbs flying everywhere —
the John Wick of gardeners.
I’m bleeding but proud.
The monster is cowed.
The 9th can’t come soon enough.
*pic courtesy of pinterest
What it was Like.
It was like an infusion of Premium ’98 in my tank,
the fuel that gave my lethargic Lamborghini zest and zing,
that taught it how to sing along the road in lusty lazarettos
of recovery; it was a discovery like Cortez first sighting
the Pacific from a peak in Darien, or to be more specific
the first time I read your little chapbook of poems
as exquisite as the chronograph on Lewis Hamilton’s arm.
*pic courtesy of pinterest
I’m flipping through my commonplace books
& I come across a poem
by Yard Sale of Thoughts
one I recognize
& I pull over like a train at a station;
it’s ebullient, freewheeling
like Dylan’s ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’
& I’m hitting the keys hard ‘coz I want to tell you
about it, how I feel;:
it feels like the sun on yr back
on a winter’s day, the bosom of yr love
in the morning,
that shiver down your spine
when you hear the riff of ‘Sugar Sugar’;
it just lifts you;
I have some poems like that too:
‘Tepid’, ‘The Indolent Killer’
a mere handful.
We are all haunted by our best poems
What’s That Word?
What’s that word? I say.
Fecund, she says.
Yes, that’s it. Unbridled growth.
Like that honeysuckle hedge that keeps wanting
to devour the house.
Like toenails, she adds, with a chuckle, which reminds me
I must make an appointment with the podiatrist.
Like some cancers, I add. Inflation, climate change.
No need to get dark, she says.
Sorry, I say, my imagination sometimes runs rampant.
Fecund, she says.
The woman next door is howling with pain.
It is 3 in the morning.
Clearly she is doing it harder than me.
I went in ten days ago
with a high fever
and within 24 hours my frail craft
had sailed off into the South Pole
where I was hit with pneumonia
and racked with pain.
It was Scott of the Antarctic meets ‘The Thing’.
I’m in calmer waters now.
Five days with minor ailments.
They’ve brought me into dock.
Going home today.
*pic courtesy of pinterest
John Malone 
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