(Listen to "Cannabis")

 

Cannabis

 

You know, I wouldn't be a poet without cannabis

I mean, it's not like I go about planning this

Stuff when I'm straight, or maybe I do, but it's just not

Enough to leave it to Fate to pull this all through the linguistic knots

That I find to unbind, because when I smoke

I've found they've unwound and it's all a big joke

That I just have to preserve

For that half that deserves

A fanciful look at conditions and causes

That unwritten book of conditional clauses

Interdependencies, subjective existence

Versus games of ascendancy, subject to insistence

By linear thought, acceptance of rules

By those who've forgotten though games are for fools,

Fools have more fun—they don't mind the drag

They always have one more trick in their bag

And draw on it when it all seems so wrong

They call up a friend and share hits from the bong!

But my preference, in truth, is oral ingestion

Maybe in deference to youth, or choral congestion

But as much for the buzz, as it's really a high that

Has its own touch, see because, as the theories describe it

The chemical blend is actually shifted

For as it's suspended it's filtered and sifted

By liver enzymes, which smoking avoids

And metabolites bind new cannabinoids

(Specifically then, the one that they call

Eleven- hydroxy- cannibinol)

That was not in the mix of the original plant

So you've got, then, a fix which is bio-enhanced

By the body's digestion and attempt to dispel it

There’s more visions, impressions—it's more psychedelic

And much smoother and slower, there's less of a crash

Than when the night's over and you've been smoking hash

So, however you take it, (and I don't say you have to)

Go smoke it or bake it, for me it has value

In balancing straight with the Factor of Freak

I think it's great, a green snack once a week

For breaking the molds, the consumerist curses

Taking the old and presuming reverses

Having a look at behaviour and habit

That assumption you took to be true 'cause you have it

Thereby vexing authority with grass- roots discursives

By that virtue sure to be recast as subversive

But it's just about life and reforming perspective

Seeing that strife can be absorbed in collective

Attempts to see clearly and achieve greater peace

As the Now and the Here become more than belief

It might be that I go about planning this

But I wouldn’t be this poet without cannabis.