Tuesday, March 10, 2020

Reasons to Quit # 117 - Tug Dumbly


Reasons to Quit # 117

Take drugs and go to a cemetery.  
Who hasn’t seen Easy Rider?  

Fresh waves of Goth fledgers
night picnic on the grave
of another harbour drowner.    
An ice pipe by the light
of the silvery goon.
Tag a headstone, kick a cross,
pull the wings off angels.
All those quaint old rituals.

Kids these days …

In my millennium it was simple:
booze, pot, acid and speed.
Know your limits. Apart from that time
I crowned a New York triumph 
with a return to town
straight into the arms
of Grievous Bodily Harm,
Oxblood amphetamine
and a litre of off-duty Smirnoff.

It put the grin on, then wiped it off.

They could have dropped me
         from the plane straight
                 into the cemetery
                     over Newtown.

I taxied home
and woke the Sunday corpses
of my house with demands that
we instantly feast my return from Troy.

I wear the wounds still
from that psychotic picnic
bounding about the boneyard.
Though the memory’s just a sunlit gash 
of playing Lizard King reanimator,
bescreeching the dead,
rutting on slabs, getting impaled
on a rusty grave railing
but neither knowing nor feeling the spear
in my side till coming to in a bloody sheet
in Holt Street, like Christ three days dead
in the tomb
                 waking to piece together
the blackout
                 of his crucifixion party.

Ah, the hijinx of youth.
I think I was forty.


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