Wanting to write a note perfect for you,
I was zonked by ten minutes to midnight
and gave up the ghost. So I scribbled blue
nothings on the sheer face of the white,
scrunched it to all but the shape of a ball and threw
it to my darkgreen fuzz of unclean carpet,
putting on a self-circling sad sung song
of lost days instead, cursing my tongue.
I heard a tin can trickle down empty streets.
I heard televisions flick themselves on in vacant rooms.
I heard a telephone’s dring-dring repeat, and repeat.
I heard a door-hinge creak, then suddenly, a slammed boom.
I heard lonely computers receive a tweet.
I heard a CD stick at Blue…Blue…Blue, never reaching the moon.
I heard a clock’s tick-tock-tick turn dong…dong…dong
and something changed in the air, something wrong.
I awoke and the room was in disfigured shape.
The desk sweated. Walls grew hair. Sour curtains
sipped the night with wrinkled lips. My clothes in a heap
looked a dead man’s, while the desklamp grew talons
and perched like a tawny owl. Repelled by the gape
of blank paper, the pen’s insinuations,
I ripped myself off from the bedsheets’ sellotape,
donned the dead man’s clothes, and made my escape.
Outside stretched a corridor with many doors
vibrating to a bass and drum thudded sound,
as if giant frogs leapt and belched beneath the floor,
over which keckled the white noise of a thousand
voices—all out of their heads. I could have swore
I lived in a terraced two-up two-down,
but on for a randyvoo, and keen to see you,
I opened the first door and walked straight through.
Half the town was in there, jam-packed and hot.
Johnny Tequila, his trousers much too tight,
tipped his bottle to my lips and didn’t stop:
liquor-fire melting my defence against the night.
Huckle-bumped music grabbed at hips and didn’t drop.
Glimmer-shimmered mirror balls spangled diamond bright.
It was a helter-skelter hell-raking hullabaloo.
But I moved on, for I couldn’t see you.
In the next room I spent time with Johnny Trip
who split me into particles and scintilla,
entered my head, re-jigged its microchip
and left me in a garden of phlox and nicotiana
where electronic stars pulsed their beeps and blips
on nightgrass alive with ghost moths and cicadas
chasing anther-dust, their eyes bright orange moons.
But I couldn’t see you, so I tried the next room.
I saw a ladder to heaven without any rungs.
I saw a truck speed through the night on fire.
I saw schoolteachers stalk schools with sawn-off shotguns.
I saw politicians sing Imagine in a naked choir.
I saw the allseeing eyeball of the sun
plucked from its socket in a tangle of wires.
I saw I was wigged-out and caught, in an endless queue,
between losing my place and looking for you.
On the stairs Johnny Debt was trading stocks and shares.
He read my accounts and hollered ‘Here comes the rain!’
I asked if he had seen you anywhere?
but he just smiled and offered a payment plan insuring fear and pain.
He had a silver watch chain, gold mane of hair,
cocaine vial, old school tie. And shit for brains.
But I had to shake him off if I was ever to find
you, so I cursed my name upon his dotted line.
Johnny Fundamental was preparing for war.
He polished his boots, primed his weapons
and swore ‘I’ll kill until I die’. ‘What for?’
I cried. But he picked up his machine gun
and quick-time marched out the door
shouting ‘Johnny! Go! Go! Go!’ Then he was gone
to make a blood sacrifice in the pine woods.
Oh Johnny find peace. Oh Johnny be good.
In the next room illegal aliens danced in cages.
Johnny Pimp made me swear to keep shtum.
Hand on heart he paid them honest wages.
He told me you’d been in my room,
but gurning over some scrunched-up pages,
had vanished quicker than an Irish summer’s bloom—
faster than snow melts, in the blink of an eye,
you’d swept into the night like a mayfly.
In the next room I was detained for a week.
Monday I made up some parables and tales.
Tuesday the room hung upon each word I did speak.
Wednesday I burnt their money like a schlemiel.
Thursday I was hounded, branded, paraded as a freak.
Friday I got hammered. Absolutely nailed.
Saturday I was sarcophagized in a worm-crawling tomb.
Sunday I rose again and left that awful room.
The next room was a simulation console
for re-experiencing past mistakes.
Johnny Regret couldn’t be consoled
and sadly sung a self-circling song for heartache
waiting to happen, which swizzled in my earhole.
Why are lost things the only things we can’t break?
They manacled me, an invisible cage,
the unknown words I must have scribbled on that page.
Johnny Spliff asked ‘You know when a tonal beat
repeats in a slow consistent rhythm
and draws you into the hypnotic secret
contained in each pulse, each drop in the ocean,
each star in space, so that chaos retreats,
or at least realigns into portioned design,
silk shot and mellow, shaped around
the mind and body’s hinted fusion in that sound;
and then, when that simple rhythm quickens
and varies, tones broaden to chords,
the volume kicks in, and this calm pattern thickens,
wells up like a fizzy drink shaken to burst
through your inner walls with good vibrations;
then you flow in time with a wave’s crest and crash,
all your particles flushed with the blush of a flower,
shouting dah-dah! in a Mardi Gras of colour;
then all the machines turn, like, organic, and hate U-
turns into hope that gushes through you, through-othered
with everyone else breaking free, riding their moment jackaroo
to that shuffle beat and crude clang and fuzztone clatter
so the undiscovered cosmos that rotates inside you
blows its wad and flops over
in a reamed steamed banana-creamed body-brain-blitzed howzat?
Well, why don’t you write some words that work like that?’
At last I came to the final room—but I was not
out of trouble. For sitting there was Johnny Double.
He had re-written the scrunched-up note
you had read. He said ‘Look, I helped you out—scribbled
a few gegs. So what? You were doing okay but got
bogged down in complicity with the world’s troubles.
If someone huffs over words, it’s their tough luck.
If you can’t laugh, you’re fucked.’
I jumped through the window. Down twelve stories I fell.
I ran for the road, but happened instead
upon a barbwire fence, on the other side of which welled
a harrowed queue of wraiths, groaning and wolf-eyed,
tattered and gowpen, clamouring to dwell
within—kept out by Johnny Border’s thin red
line and armed guard, Alsatians and blowlamps,
his neat desk of paperfiles, inkpad and stamp.
I ran the rest of the night to a dew-soft lawn,
and on, into a wood of sycamore and pine
where I gashed through wild bramble as the slow-dawned
sky went gaga, glowing garnet and aquamarine,
while I thrashed through fernbrake and blackthorn
until the wood broke where coastal winds whined
and wheezed, the sky glummed, and the green-foamed
sea scunged to call its raindrops home.
Down raindrops plupped off the face of things and died.
From woven-coloured wood-shadows, Johnny Debt,
who’d trailed me ever since, sat down by my side,
put his arm around me, and together we watched wet
stragglers from the party trek their tired
way home on curving paths, becoming rainswept
and smaller, glistened blurs upon the leaze.
And now I know you won’t come back to me
until the earth spins seven times around the moon;
until the clogged air clears and cools and breathes;
until there are no more busts and booms;
until the cows come home; you won’t come back to me
until I learn to hold a tune;
until Icarus beats his wings and rises from the sea;
until the summer’s in the meadow;
until the valley’s hushed and white with snow;
until pigs fly, and water turns to whisky
or wine, and there’s no more sour grapes;
until human nature is no longer a disease;
until we’ve free money, free love, and a free church in a free lay state.
And when you come, it’s soft you’ll tread above me,
but not until these falling nights abate
and I wake up, figure out what to do,
wanting to write a note perfect for you.