White Rabbit

These pills in an small agate box;
Carry on as if…

Take each day the daily dose.

Medicine: a semi-precious stone,
Or counterfeit health trapped by it.
Powders and potions, nothing but
The dust of ground-down rocks.

Just ask Alice. Or Jefferson.

One pill to wake you early;
One to bring you sleep;
One to thin the blood like water;
One unused, for you to keep.

Just ask Alice. Flying the heavens.

Iatrogenic…
Physician, heal thyself.
So many ills grow in the tissue
From our own scatterings:
Beads of plastic sweat upon the world;
Fuming particles slick on our breath;
Littered packages from our pointless gifts,
Not even gifts of giving, fragile wrappings
Disguising humdrum days, then discarded.

Ask Alice. Or the Airplane. What was done? Before…

A drug for all occasions! Beat the clock! Unmark time!

Bit by bit the threads unwind
Or, by these preparations, knit again;
How by slow unraveling time grinds us
And we, by sly devices, reconstitute the grit.
Mercury cures the love-sickened
Or mads the hatter shaking to a fool;
Bismuth stills the inner wind
Of misfortunate excess.

Ask anyone. Who was there? Tablets of chalk or stone.

When the heart fails, a tincture stills the beat,
When the brain, a watch, swung, mesmerises
When the body falls, a salt beneath the nostrils,
Ammoniac and raw, raises even Lazarus.

Ask Alice. So small. Insignificant. As we must be.

One pill to make you stronger
One to make you tall
One to stir the flowing blood;
One to end it all.

© BH, 2016

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I do have a small agate box for pills and potions to get me through the working day. And it seems strange, in later years, to still be reliant on such concoctions for well-being.

I was a child of the sixties and I still remember the psychology field trips of the sixties and seventies. How little has changed, except the purpose and necessity of our medication.

So this came to me – invoked, in part, by a combination of Lewis Carrol’s Wonderland and Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit. With added schadenfreude concerning the benefits of modern life and its exploiters of invention and stuff. 

Oh, yes, back in the days of Kantner and Slick, feed your head was a slogan for liberation and not a little recreation. How we toked and popped, snorted it up. 

What got us in the end was, fundamentally, time itself. Now we still toke and pop, not for fun, just to stay vertical.