Ketamine Trip with Chas and Dave on the Stereo

What sort of person snorts a porky line of ravers’ smack,
then plays the greatest hits of Chas and Dave?
You’re looking at him lying flat out on his back,
his third eye peeking through perception’s bars.
I’m bouncing round a Cockney universe
where pearly angel-kings are beckoning beyond the grave.
They wink at me beside the Pearly Gates and then disperse
in a trillion stars.

Gertcha! Off they vanish
into another dimension,
like a young-retired plumber to a Spanish
villa. Gertcha!
Jason tips his seventh gin and cherryade
down his floating neck and buzzes, “Did I ever mention
that Chas and Dave once played
on an Eminem track? I’m a zealous researcher.”

He hacks up phlegm and fires it out the window like a charmer.
I watch it hit the garden fence about five minutes later
as I lambeth-walk around Nirvana.
“D’you mind?” the Dalai Lama scolds me. “Such an uncouth habit!
Meditation’s nobler and more modest!”
The room’s a flowering crater.
One moment I’m a carpet, next a forest,
and all around is rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit.

I swim along the castle wall,
where all my veins and arteries are London.
My bladder is the Royal Albert Hall.
The rhythm rocks me off to heaven.
Jason’s face is here and there and there and here.
So’s the back of his quiffy Dravidian head, it’s quite redundant
to talk to him below the stratosphere.
He’s got four arms like Vishnu. Now it’s six or seven.

“When they were session musicians they played on a song
by Labi Siffre, called ‘I Got the Blues’.
Then Eminem sampled it. If I’m not wrong,
it was ‘My name is Slim Shady’.”
I beam my soul at fleets of spaceships, every one a target,
through a wormhole as I cruise
along the astral planes and down to Margate.
“Yeah, I’ve heard that. Maybe.”