She exhaled her smooth silk smoke over me and I lost my way

in a fog, a haze of riches of electric touch upon

the one crumpled silk stocking she was wearing and I remained

there for several nights.

The distant sound of a saxophone beating against the lips of a master

as she asked me time and time again, whether sugar, was I alright?

I told her she was fine, it was me I worried about and the stinking sleepness

I felt as the bed heaved and swallowed and caught my breath and

made me want to vomit

as if I had caught sight of the very dream I was escaping from,

stalking me, club in hand, and making a smack on the palm

in which they would practised imagining was my head; brow beating, brown beating

clown dealing wrath in which I was the permanent clichéd punch line.

I miss your company.

I miss the nectar of sweet whisky filled release

in which my nightmares sang out of tune and shimmered with the glow

of a faint rolled up cigarette fighting, bathing in the glow of a second atomic sun.

The week that I lost with you as you crawled inside my head,

accompanied by the sound of the cracking of wet logs, moss eaten

bacon chewing goodness, amber like release.

Could I have stayed with you? One more hour on a bed that made me toss

and turn like a rabbit caught in the sights of a famer’s torch

and staring down the barrel of her guns

that she kept for show above the mantelpiece,

she had pointed one at me, and whilst I knew it was unloaded,

I couldn’t help but piss myself as she made me beg for mercy.

 

My last night in her company I vowed I would never deal with crazy again,

it was a promise I failed to keep as I seemed drawn

to the darkness they all offered, crazy disguised as passion,

the fanatical dreamers who had lived too much in a fog

of their own billowing excess and for whom the idyll was to die young.

I never had a blood brother, but I cut myself for many a woman.

A blood brother might have been easier, there never really is

much of a fallout when brother’s part ways, one for the road

with dear Kerouac, leaving any Carlos behind.

She was a fanatic, pouring her intellectual mind over

any damned words I would write and I bought into it for a while

as the shimmering master continued to play with his sax.

 

Crazy is as crazy does, I have an urge to slip into a glass and watch you slip

into a cocktail

dress and see your magpie like hair play a tune to any Jazz beat

as you hit me again and again in time with Buddy Rich’s anger.

Your one crumpled stocking on a hairless leg, is asking to be kissed…

the other I gnaw at trying to release its hold where you left me, the gun

never far from being loaded and cocked, hangs

over the fireplace and I know that I have ventured into my stinking

cesspit of a nightmare

once more,

as you hold my sweaty hand and kiss the scar that runs across my palm.

 

Ian D. Hall 2015.