It shot up my nose like a lemon-juice-tipped
broomstick and as I coughed for water
and rumbled for the toilet, the thought swept
across my brain that I should never trust drugs
with numbers in their name. Minutes later,
in a dungeon-black cubicle and a state of war with my belly,
as my tinnitus blinked away
in yellow and green in the corner of my left eye,
a pirouetting pyrotechnic ghost dug
a cloaked skeletal finger into my understanding
of the universe. I replied, “Really?
Hmm. It’s like that, is it? Right,
I see,” before the cubicle grew rafters, an arch,
stained glass and flashing crucifixes and, landing
back in the party room that interrogated with light,
I asked, “Do you feel like you’re trapped in a medieval church?
Because I do.”
And then I discovered the stuff of life.
Orange peel.
With its cruelly underrated
mattressy pith, the most beautiful stuff
I’d ever touched,
ripping it into pieces and hurling them to the sky
with a “Wahey!”
as they plopped back down on my exalted,
newly-enlightened head. “I don’t make sense!
None of you people make sense either.
The only thing that makes any sense is this
orange peel,” and with a pair of women’s pants
over my face to barricade the siren glare
of the light-bulb, we spent some time together,
just me and the orange peel
and the occasional fizzing cross
or cherub or phantom or gargoyle
or spray of tinnitus or spinning cartwheel
and it was my happiest moment since that party where
a medicine ball hung from the ceiling
by a rope that purpled my arms as I gripped
onto it, a team of squatters hurling
me round and round and round and round
higher faster higher faster higher faster
higher than the Tibetan Central Bank’s attic-flap
before I bit by bit by bit by bit stopped,
foot entangled in rope,
getting dragged along the pine floor
like a satchel in a schoolboy’s hand
as the rent-shirkers, with all the vigour they could muster,
all the flying kicks they could have sprung,
battered and deflated the ball
which for some reason I didn’t understand
was filled with peanuts, so I just cackled like a fool
as I lay trapped on the floor getting showered
with peanuts and peanuts and peanut-dust
and peanuts and peanuts and peanut-dust
and peanuts and peanuts and peanut-dust
and then I ran out
of orange peel.
“Please! In the name of the Lord!
I beg of you! For the love of Christ,
please, just give me a piece of orange peel!”
I bellowed from my heart,
but as I aardvarked across the carpet fit to burst
with laughter, roaring like a gale,
scraps of orange peel raining down
on me from all corners of the room,
a memory cannonballed into my brain
of a schizophrenic woman outside my home
poisoned with grief for her runaway daughter,
flailing for my help, gargling my name.
“Please!” she’d wailed. “I beg of you!”
Elbows on floor, covered in orange peel, laughter
smacking to a halt, I fell silent.
A switch flipped in my mind
that night. I don’t know how.
Perhaps something was lying dormant.
Months down the line I can still see
crucifixes and cartwheels flashing around
behind my eyelids as I lie
drifting dreamwards, albeit with the contrast
turned right down.
A switch also flipped, much to her interest
and concern, in Esmerelda’s mind the night that stuff
shot up her nose like a salty plunger.
Esmerelda. Thin as a bay leaf.
Tarantula hair. Tin-opener teeth.
Normally only pulls ganja
out of her knitted grass-bag.
A witch, born of witches, reincarnated
as witches she claims, with a furball-cougher called Fizgig.
“There’s some kind of unplacated
spirit in this house,” she told us, the house
that was really an abandoned nursery school complete
with handprintlets on walls, painted monkey horse
elephant giraffe, plastic chairlets, coloured-paper
names Archie Maria Gavin Olga Rajiv Kate,
gnome-sized toiletlets. “I can hear
someone who’s been touched by the grim reaper,
this constant jabbering, something about a bloke
who had a heart attack.
It’s loudest in my room, I can’t sleep there
anymore, I’ll have to shift
my arse to the other side of the building.”
To which Rachel my scalding-
witted cudgel-tongued girlfriend later scoffed,
“Bollocks! If she’s a witch then I’m
Ho Chi Minh. There’s nothing in that room,”
storming up the stairs like a blonde-haired Sherman tank.
Minutes later she crept down again,
shaken and white as a winter scene paperweight,
whispering, “Yeah, she’s right,
there’s something in there.
The moment I entered, my heart filled with pain,
with the feeling something was trying to choke me,
something more than a bit stroppy.
Whatever’s in there, it ain’t
fucking happy.”
