​POETRY  -  
          With a Theme of Time 

"Seeing the Light of God
          Exchanging words with the Devil"     

                                      Photo by Weebly                               

The Demon Whose Number Came Up
by Horehound Stillpoint
​(aka Greg Taylor)

T. S. Eliot, I disagree:
August is the cruelest month
Your free time dwindles
Summer’s promises have come to naught
Fall lurks around the corner and winter threatens
Everything bores
            yet the rush for fun beats a drum on the wind
Time seems to stop and stretch simultaneously
Time becomes this tangled difficult slog
You should enjoy every hour of every day, Grandma frequently reminded
Because when you get old
Time goes by ever so fast
She told me after sixty, the years go by as if in an MGM pictorial trope
When the calendar months fall like leaves off a tree
She said it happens to everybody
But I’m seventy-three and it hasn’t happened yet
Maybe it’s because I never grew up
Never had kids
Never had a nine to five job
Or maybe it’s because I never settled into a three-cocktail habit
            which was apparently my birthright, or at least
            part of the legacy of the fifties sixties family under this roof
Hell Drambuie was the home remedy of choice in Grandma’s house
Here, honey, she would say, have two sips of Drambuie
            and see if that doesn’t settle your tummy
But I was part of a generation more interested in LSD
Drambuie can also fall like a leaf turned dried specimen
LSD was my home remedy for fifteen years
Got a poison oak rash:  drop some acid and hitchhike to Vegas
Caught a cold:  take this sugar cube with your coffee in the morning
Feel like your life is going up in smoke, hopes crushed
            dreams squashed aches doubled troubles unending
Blotter acid to the rescue!
Stuff so clean you sleep on it and have the dreams of your life
Those were the years that flew by: nineteen seventy two to eighty seven
God I loved them
             but I don’t miss all that crazy shit actually
Seeing the Light of God
Exchanging words with the Devil
Watching the whole Haight Ashbury neighborhood succumb to a full scale
            Sci-fi apocalyptic military takeover
With a sky full of surveillance-hungry drones following everybody’s every move
I was grabbing people and begging for help
            for shelter or Wait! How do you get off the sidewalk again?
My one and only bad trip wuzza humdinger
But it set me on a path and time is now seen
            as puzzle and solution simultaneously
After ten years of studying the Bhagavad Gita
Five years of sitting zazen
Two years of the Direct Method
Fourteen years of Kadam Buddhism and whadya know
Giving and Taking removes me from the equation
            who knew that would feel so good
Making prayers sets the foundation
Meditation keeps the world sane for as long as humanly possible
The Pandemic dropped time to a crawl
The twenty first century turned out to be full of pricks
            not to mention ruder than anyone could have imagined
Sometimes all you can do is surrender
Hope for some glimpses of clarity
Hope for a bit of patience
I know I’m supposed to have infinite patience but c’mon
This is me
Lucky lunky boneheaded me
Weird wiry numbskull me
Being all grateful and not hardly dead
The Dead are everywhere in San Francisco today
            Deadheads are too
I find myself nostalgic for a band I never loved
Being so wrapped up in Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Patti Smith, DEVO
             X-Ray Spex, the Clash and the Damned
            Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Grace Jones, Marvin Gaye
So many nights of such soaring and penetrating music
My lover and I didn’t even fight getting into bed
I’d close my eyes after some musical ecstasy and think
            If I die tonight, I am fine with everything
Which was great until everything went to hell in my fifties
And life took so many tumbles in my sixties
            I might as well have been watching my laundry spin
And nothing prepared me for turning seventy-three
God oh God oh God
If I die tonight, no, I am not
Not fine with everything
I have to do better than this
The creature I am now is not good enough
Funny though that “Not Good Enough” is Demon Number One
His were the sadistic eyes and sawtooth mouth at which I gaped
            face to face
What could I do but grab my hat and run away
Cars were trying to run me over
Bus drivers wouldn’t stop
The neighborhood unlit in an unfriendly way
Feeling mean mad small tight terrified for sixteen hours
For sixteen hours a demon held me in its sway
Time itself only bounced me back into normal reality
            the moment I remember whose disciple I am
I am
I am still
I am still praying
Taiyata Om Bekhadze Bekhadze Maha Bekhadze
            Randza Samugate Soha
Medicine Buddha to the rescue
Medicine Budda for the win
Medicine Buddha before sin
Medicine Buddha is all for you
Because transcendance eclipses time
            single pointedly

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​Work by Horehound Stillpoint (aka Greg Taylor) has been collected in over thirty anthologies including:  Poetry Nation; Bullets & Butterflies; Bend, Don't Shatter; Sex Spoken Here; Pills, Thrills, Chills, and Heartache; Poetry Slam; and Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? He self-published three chapbooks, Dovetail, The Inside Dirt, and Some Holy Googolplex. For 35 years, he has shared his poetry and other work live in theaters, bars, and coffee shops from Orange County and New Orleans to Vancouver and New York City. His poems have been taught at Harvard.

Editor's note: Horehound Stillpoint (aka Greg Taylor) is a first-time contributor to Vistas & Byways  

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