The green becomes yellow, becomes brown,
becomes skeletal and soft underfoot.
The paths that were once footsure
and easy to negotiate
are now either traps of sucking mud
or flowing streams.

The stream is now the river;
what was once the gentle ambient plink plonk
of random xylophones
is now the violent death metal torrent
of sibilant snarling whites
and the rumbling boulder subsonics of the tanic brown sludge
washing minerals down into the sea loch
Dissolving the mountains just a little bit more.

Gone are the twilights of flirting owls
and here are the winds of gusting howls.
Gone are the itches of the insect bites
and here are the cold toes and fingers.
The never ending nights.
The moths in headlamps
swapped for your own breath.

Radio signals bent by the gales.
Rockall, Malin becoming cyclonic
Losing identity
Falling slowly.
Sailing By.

I don’t hate gays,
or people with different ways,
I like crispy bacon
and unmarried baby making,
and am not the slightest bit feared
of not having a big bushy beard.
And condemning the gullible to and early grave
by banning condoms is depraved.

If I do bad, I don’t answer to some guy
in the sky
but to my friends and carry the burden till I die
Not deny
my sins and cast off my deeds
with a bit of chanting and rattling some beads.
And I have to admit I am perfectly happy
to go through life without an orange nappy.

I have no inclinations of joining your pyramid scheme
buying into some time-share dream
where I have to die to find out
that Heaven is just a building site.
Instead, I’ll bypass giving the cut to the greedy
and donate directly to the needy.

And if one day, I feel a need to kiss up to some made up guy
I’ll float my own up into the sky.
And I’ll forgo the hassle
of living up to your Almighty Asshole,
who wreaks misery just for kicks
and never seems to punish pricks.

I wish there was something I can do to help.
My arms hang conspicuously at my sides, twitching with guilt.
I know from personal experience,
that there is nothing really that can be done,
but waiting for the tide of tortuous biochemicals,
to ebb,
and to stand on the shore,
shouting words of encouragement,
‘Keep treading the water!’, ‘It doesn’t last forever!’ and other clichés.

Moreover, her blackness is so bereft of light,
so near (but not close) to the passive violence of absolute zero,
so much like a black hole,
sucking in all matter, all energy, all protons,
that come close to her,
I fear that if I were to reach out,
I would lose my fingers, my hand, my whole arm.
An arm I would give if it would cure this.

‘Nothing lasts forever’,
not the depressive attacks;
and there is some ultimate comfort in knowing that
not me, nor Xxxxx will last forever,
nor the seas on the crust nor Earth itself,
nor the vast universe.
A universe that seems to fill so easily with a tiny individual’s pain,
perhaps the fastest velocity that can be measured is not light after all,
but the dark.

They proudly controlled their little kingdom,
now overrun with white rats and barbed wire fences.
Expiring rich OAPS and ephemeral tourists
now squat on your land.
Land robbed of its lifeblood.
Those people, my people,
evicted and our culture extirpated.
I stand on the soil that brought me to life
and I still feel your blood under my feet.

I never got to say goodbye to you.
And like the photographs
the colour of you has faded in my mind
and your face is all but a blur
that I can decipher with a mirror.
You are bleaching out and fading to white.
But you remain a visceral energy in my heart,
firing in my thoughts and rushing in my blood.

I meet you behind bulletproof glass,
a separation designed to keep you safe and me at bay,
and as close as we are I am no one to you, not even a person.
I meet another behind the same glass,
put there as a punishment,
as a measure to keep them within,
and despite the partition
we are still connected by some force that penetrates it;
emotive photons, perhaps.

I sit down beside you.
You are degrading.
You no longer recognise me.
You think I’m your husband
and the bombs are still burning people alive on the horizon.
I can’t go on any longer,
because you are only alive in the physical sense.
So for my own sanity,
I have to pull the plug on you
before they hang up the sign saying ‘no resuscitation’.
But the you that has gone, is still lingering on in me,
and through new generations.

And though there are so many physical miles between us,
it seems a shorter distance to the anonymous people I pass every day.
I feel you close to me, penetrating deep inside of me.
Even though I have learned that nothing’s forever and the meaning of pain;
all of these relative separations just reinforce how valuable this is.

Week upon week carried over on the sagging shoulders
of hidden-in-plain-sight over-familiarity.
… more like digging your own grave with your bare fingers,
scraped and scratched, shovelless.

Months become years in the mute and patiently despairing parlour charade.
Like a ‘terminal case’ normalcy is hopelessness.
Like a teabag being recycled to the point
of being a flavourless ritual
replacing long forgotten pleasures.

A relationship instinctively treading water,
like a shipwreck survivor,
waiting either for rescuer,
predator,
or just to succumb to exhausted atrophy,
and then sink to the bottom like a stone.

Libriumland
is the land of jelly joy
for every smiling Cipramil girl and every betablocker boy.
Where life is celebrated
as though the citizens
are all intravenously opiated

In Happy Valium Valley
No one ever sighs
No one ever lies
No one ever cries
No one ever dies
Everyone always has enough food
and the news is always good
No one would ever leave
even if they could
if and you aren’t permanently ecstatic
then you maybe should.
Across every face a grin beams,
all is great,
or so it seems.

But here the world view is artificial
and the contentment superficial.
No one learned the lesson
of the ostrich and the sand
‘Abandone ye all reason
ye who enter Valiumland!’
Where they are being blinded by the light
and have no dark to contrast the white
and without the bad they know no happiness
because without contentment there is no stress
and with no harm there is no pain
and no mechanism to stop you coming back again
again
again
like a goldfish insane
when you put your hand into a flame.

Eventually reality creeps through
the cracks in the emotional damn
and all too late the Libriumites
learn to spit their dummies
from their prams
and balanced rational thoughts
rain down like incoming mortar.
The epiphany they have long blocked
they aren’t blessed babes in cots
but fettered lambs to the slaughter
to be released from here only by captive bolt
a gush of blood through the nose
a final shuddering jolt;
hung, drawn and quartered,
sliced then diced,
connective tissue becoming cat meat.

All of which could have been averted
if a simple truth had not been perverted:
Life can never be complete
without the sour to complement the sweet

Happy Ending.
__

P.S. I have had personal experience of some of these medications, so take my use of them as being metaphorical rather than factual representations of how they effect people.

And I can see
that am I you and you are me
We are harmonious standing waves of energy
that we call DNA,
mere eddies and confluences of forces
that imperceptibly fade away.
Self replication
of a mineral equation
that subtracts from one to multiply the other.
Though the sum total of the biosphere never varies.

We are harmonic partners
in the resonant decay
of the original hammer strike
in the darkness before days.
Rising out the minerals of the crust
like fungus too
we return to dust,
and in others renew.

Though man invents conceits
and refuses to see
that crow and man and galaxy
are by nature inherently temporary.

And what of random genetic mutation?
Is this Supreme Being also wheelchair-bound
and kept alive on ventilation?
It may explain why his divine interventions
never extend to curing amputations.

Does the Omnipotent suffer ulcer and anxiety
from His conflicting homophobia and homosexuality?
Or is He just another polygamous polytheistic love-rat
scurrying from deistic port to port,
from Bible, Qran to Mahabbarat ,
in one bed Yahweh, another Allah
to Wakantanka to others
up in Valhalla.

But might it be
just possibly that
we are not made after he
but he of we?
As this omniscient lunatic
never seems to see,
into the future
any further than early AD.

And though in human terms
it can be said
that in our time
you are already dead,
in terms of astrophysics
you energy will still spread
onwards and outwards
creating new corners in absolute zero ahead.

And in this place
where we look up yonder,
and for tens of thousands of years wonder,
if one day we’ll amongst you wander.
There are worse ways
an evening to squander.

First, it was pocket money that was donated
to corporate cancer vendors, superannuated.
Then one or two a day were no longer enough,
so the my lunch money went also up in a puff.
Then with a personal income as I got older,
my smoking became prolific and ever bolder.
I would assault myself with packs of twenty,
sometimes thirty and forty,
always coughing a plenty.

I signed years away to a cohort of deniers
protesting that we enjoyed the smoke,
that we weren’t just addicted liars.
But a few times, I did attempt
with total and utter dismay
to rid myself of the weed
that turned my pink skin grey.

As time marched on
and my breath grew short,
I began to doubt the sanity of smoking
when my grandfather slowly died
on the Oncology Ward.
It was then I knew the bitter truth
the drug to which I was hooked
was clinically more addictive and damaging
than a life on manky heroin
and left me fiscally rooked.

I had read that book by Alan Carr,
which probably bought him
a nice brand new car,
but was no help to me
by any far…

So, one day I seized the emphysemic bull
by the thrombrotic horns
and dragged it to the quack
then lead to a chemist
to wear nicotine in a patch.
And nineteen months down the smokeless line,
I can now tell you where to stub out your old Woodbine.

I have been told by the diehard smoking community
That the cigarettes would always be with me
that never an hour ever pass me by
without a pang for asphyxia and a wistful sigh.
But really, in braking my addiction to the cigarette
I happily plod along with no regret,
no “good memories” that I must forget.
Rather, many bad ones to remember
many thanks for no limbs dismembered.

The twenty-nine years of money burned
pay hopefully for a life lesson learned
than an addiction can always be overturned
and the killer weed can be finally spurned.