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.