Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll

Sex, drugs, rock & roll are the topics for this week's Poetry Bus, driven by The Watercats' clever hands while the Totalfeckineegit takes his rest from bus driving. We were supposed to record our reading, too, but alack and alas, I have old stuff and no microphone. I'm lucky I'm even attached to the Internet.

There's a little bit of everything in this poem, written for my best pal Tonya McClure. She lost her fight against cancer, but she was a Deadhead to the end. That's her beautiful mug up there, at the start of this post.

The Grateful Dead Girl

The Deadhead girl is tie-dyed all over, barefoot,
smoking reefer washed down by whiskey,
the whole psychedelic world at her fingertips.

The music grows wings and soars overhead
while the bass and the drums grow feet
and stomp the wooden floor in a cadence
ripe for dancing.
She dances, big beautiful girl,

with a curtain of hair that swings
in rhythm with the pulse of the Dead.
Love is free and it is flowing everywhere
within the planet formed by the music

and her awkward edges blur until she blends
with the sounds of the Grateful Dead.
She is the Grateful Dead and no longer tormented
by the dark otherness that plagues her
on Mondays, or Wednesdays,
in grocery stores or mirrors.

She goes home in a sweet cocoon of Deadness
with a panting heart and laughter
for having danced at the center of the music.

Decades slip past for the Deadhead girl
leaving only gauzy memories to clench
and clench she does on Mondays, or Wednesdays,
in supermarkets and in mirrors, which show
her neck has grown wings that flap unkindly
at her throat.

Her awkward edges have returned
with a vengeance,
for no longer do the reefer
and the whiskey lend a soft-focus loveliness
to the dark otherness that has always plagued her.

She knows now that love is never free,
and her fight with cancer needs a clear head.
Her children groan into lives of their own.
Grandchildren sprout in a corner of her life,
and devotion rocks her down to her toes.

Old Grateful Dead posters still cling to her walls,
as she contemplates death coming round
the next corner.
Dancing exhausts her
but she keeps the beat with her foot on the floor.
The concert soon will finish, but she’s grateful
she once danced at the center of the music.

~~~~~~~~~~

For more sex, drugs, rock & roll, take a ride on TFE's Poetry Bus.