It’s May 2025
I’ve shaved off all my hair
And dreamed aloud
In my hotel room.
Just off the Stationsplein.
I ate fruit and read Dante
“O human race, born to fly upward, wherefore a little wind dost thou so fall?”
I crossed the Dam and I think I spotted the ghost of a 17 year old me sat on the steps of the National Monument smoking a joint.
Long hair.
Beat up clothes.
Hesse’s ‘ Steppenwolf’ in my back pocket.
I was a kite of freedom pitched up in the sky.
The design was a dragon and a flower.
Like the twin roles the young me was rehearsing in that year -1974.
Unsure of everything/certain of too much.
I was Zen bones and a koan sleight of hand.
Sure to be a one boy/man revolution.
My own personal Vietnam and 68 French riots.
I was an anti-psychiatrist in a padded cell.
A Rock & Roll bird hopping from note to note.
If I knew love it was it was like a homemade plane
that wouldn’t get off the ground
Crashed and snubbing the earth with a crumpled plywood nose.
Like Chet crumpled blooded and broken beneath the balcony of his 3rd floor room in
the Hotel Prins Hendrik a few hundred yards from where I stand
Gone at 58 in 1988 ’cool’ trumpet playing Icarus.
Never learned to fly.
Back then I dreamed with the brakes off.
In free fall In psychedelic colours ‘tripping’ through the galaxy.
Wearing the universe like a multi coloured Zoot suit.
A kaftan dipped in a rainbow.
My image imported from India and Morocco.
Mayakovsky had ‘ clouds in his pockets’.
I had nebulae,constellations and starbursts.
Now I’m old and dream in autumn colours.
A winter chill strokes my cheek and my days are numbered
in an old fashioned way I never could have imagined.
Fifty years ago, sat in the Dam feeling free.
“The heavens call to you, and circle about you, displaying to you their eternal splendors, and your eye gazes only to earth”
.
Malcolm Paul
.