Magic Mushrooms

‘The colour has run from your shirt,’ I said

 ‘To lie on the churly seat!’

 ‘Too late, too late,’ said the surly mate

 ‘To be born of the sworn elite.’

 ‘Your head says - ‘cut along dotted line’

 And I would, but haven’t a pen.’

 ‘The road is right and the day is night...’

 You used to be my friend.

 

‘If only you’d taken the turn you did

Before, when it meant so much!’

‘Ah, more's the pity and more’s the pity

I should have been married Dutch!’

‘You should have been shouldn’t, and that’s a fact,’

I started to disagree,

But caught a glimpse of a glance of mine

Stone dead in my memory.

 

The face half turned of a friend of mine

That became a wife of his,

But Phil was driving to count the lies

That we’d both tell, after this:

‘I’ve often thought that the time was wrong,

I was born with an evil star...’

But she must have loved you once, I thought,

Then the dash lit up, like a bar!

 

The bonnet grew and the wheels fell off

And the roar persisted red,

‘If all you’d written was all you’d thought,

(Have ever you heard it said),

If half you see is the perfect truth

And half of the truth is lies,

If half of nothing is half as much

Again, and a half surprise...’

 

‘I know... the half of a half-truth is

Only half of the half we see...’

So we both shut up, and we thought of her,

And we looked at the scenery.

‘We’ll never make it to Hay, you know

At the rate it’s moving away...’

As long as she comes away, I thought,

Caught up in some new affray.

 

‘Have ever you really hurt someone

That you loved, as I have done?’

He would have said, but his head fell off

And became a kitchener bun.

‘The trees are back on the march again,

And the moon is wide and free.’

‘I seem to have lost my knees,’ said Phil.

Her thighs had swallowed me.

 

‘The road is gathering speed,’ said Phil,

I thought I could trust you two!'

'Trust no man in a woman’s hand �"'

I fingered the curlicue.

‘We should be there by your birthday, Phil,’

And there was Hay, in the mist,

But I was trying to count the lies

That we’d both tell, after this!

 

David Lewis Paget