shall we to the winds escape
and fly free
if only for a time
to the west and the south
to the waters as blue as the sky?

we’ll take our hearts along
as metronomes to guide our steps
and keep in pace and time with
one another

Over time I have been compiling a list of things, that, should I ever do said things, my loved ones have been instructed to shoot me.

1. Get locked into a particular decade of music and just stop there
2. Starting sentences with the phrase “in my day…”
3. Tell strangers about how turmeric helps my achy joints
4. Lose the ability to understand new technology
5. When 40 percent or more of my diet becomes fibre
6. Regularly wear socks with sandals
7. Pull my pants/shorts waistline over my belly button
8. When more than half of my conversations are about my ailments
9. When I start competing with others about how much sicker I am than they are
10. Go to the beach fully clothed in pants, shirt, socks, shoes, hat, coat etc.
11. Say NO to every suggestion about literally anything
12. Assume people younger than me are less intelligent than me

It’s a short list but growing every day…

a neighbour’s pot is in the evening air
somehow both sweet and acrid all at once
and I am gone away to summer and 19 years old;

a hash and coke and who knows what place,
where money left the hands faster than it came
as David Byrne and Jon Anderson sing
to a laughinglaughinglaughing crowd
that knows they’re there
but can’t bring themselves to care;
minstrels to an idiot court

today that first swallow of Corona
(LA CERVESA MAS FINA)
tastes like old Molson Golden
and shades of grandpa on the couch

one simple sense
links to some unused bundle of neurons
and triggers ghosts of loved ones gone

stupid

I wonder what will bring mum to me
when she is gone some day distant

friend pork chops and boiled potatoes;
spinach and beans; chili and cigarette smoke
stale and carried on a winter breeze
stealing in through an open door or window

morbid

one swallow of Corona and the dead and the not dead
come to haunt me in the open air
with pulling hands

not yet

in the sun
there is the humming transformer
and the sound of traffic
to and fro,
there is hot pavement,
and there is cicada crying loudly in worship
to the sky for the gift of heat waves
and the possibility of furthering the species

this is a moment;
it is a hot black tar between the toes moment
lost in time,
to float away in the mind
and perhaps drift back again some day,
some day far and farther away

it is a shirtless, shorts wearing day;
an I-don’t-give-a-fuck kind of day
where the world is what happens in the background
and the immediate is simply breath and sweat

these days are too few;
stretched like gum from finger to lips
and close to breaking but not quite;

oh but to drown in these days;
to lay back beneath them
and stare at the rippled world beyond them
and never have to breathe again

under the eaves,
it starts with a phrase,
like,
under the eaves
or a thought
or a look
a painted sky
bleeding with the setting sun…
it starts with a thought
that floats random to the surface
from some deeper current
hidden away and in the dark –

out of sight;

it starts,
it starts like a first heartbeat
and never ends to til’ the last
always coming on
and pushing urgently through
with some message
that makes no sense
but comes with intent…

it starts with a phrase
or a glance
or a shape sound colour taste
and it can’t go away…just keeps scratching through
from the skull’s inside