across the universe

 

today was the day that unhinged specimen gunned down john lennon all those years ago.

he was able to acquire a 38 special with great ease for only 169 dollars in honolulu,thanks to those ridiculous gun laws.

he forgot to buy bullets,and when arriving in the big apple,he learned that new york’s own law forbade the sale of them.

however,he knew a deputy sherrif in atlanta,so he flew down there and got what he wanted.

while he’d been in new york he splashed out on a room at the waldorf astoria,

but on return with the bullets and less money,he booked into a room at the ymca hostel on 63rd street.

in the next room he could hear two gay men having sex.

in disgust he considered gunning them,but instead the specimen moved to a sheraton hotel.

after he’d taken away the life of john,the cops gathered the things from his hotel room and found a listings magazine.

during that very week,david bowie was doing his compassionate and beautifully nuanced interpretation of ‘the elephant man’ on broadway.

the specimen had drawn a circle around that on the page.

 

when someone like me goes into revery over things like the beatles,i occasionally get wrongly accused of living in the past.

dear reader,my take on life is that the past,present and future all merge into one…

that’s how we navigate through, or make sense of our lives…all three tenses surely co-exist.

 

i never did that thing of loving one beatle more than the others.

paul,george,and ringo all charmed me good,

but i recall being real young in northern ireland spending a lot of time in coastal amusement arcades listening to the jukeboxes,where i’ve got this special memory of ‘help’ chiming out.

it had such an urgent intro..straight in with john’s call for emotional rescue.

the sound was joyous,but there was something in those words that evoked a strange sadness,that my young mind couldn’t make sense of yet…

my third sense had registered it though,and to this day, that song fills me right up,and it’s clearly one of johns lyrics.

he spoke to me every step of the way.

working class hero was another,and music lovers close to me know i did my own reading of that song too…

so here’s to john,and all the others…

a thought for george,who having just gone through severe grim chemotherapy,had a specimen break into his home and stab him several times.

 

oscar wilde once said “it’s easy to sympathise with the less fortunate,but it takes a true individual to have empathy for the successful ones”

heaven knows it should be easy, when you think about what happened to john and george.

it’s little wonder ringo gets grumpy.

isn’t it amazing how paul still manages to exude his lovely air of openness.

 

all my loving

mary cigarettes.