When I used to get stoned
or smashed as we often called it
I was hopeless.
Simple thoughts found chasms,
the crossing of which was nigh on impossible.

Reverie and reality danced awkwardly,
split and splattered,
and the head dropped low,
picking over one or two nagging truths
flowing hidden in the grass at one’s feet.

That unseen raging creek, like a football coach going on and on ,
A weak sun, bleak as the oval after the game;
Strata of smoke elevated and cutting across dreamy mountains.

How can a creek, hidden in the trees, make so much noise?
And doesn’t that bird know when to close its mouth?
And that mumble down in the valley,
why doesn’t it just go away and get right outa here?
I wish I had a cigarette and a quiet companion.
Then I would wish for time to be frozen, not like in any-old -snapshot
but as it can be on an absolutely still day.
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What’s it like on an absolutely still day?
On an absolutely still day the grass doesn’t grow
and you can watch for hours the same cloud
and the same mountain sitting sixty miles away,
waiting for the photo.
You can see the dam-water - which is still
and the tree - which is still,
and even the sun neither adds to, nor lessens the temperature.
Somewhere, a few 100 metres away,
a feathered friend introduces a long, extended, mellow alarm clock ‘clickity-clickity’
and someone still forgot to turn off the waterfall; 
there is sound of a sort, but there is still no movement on an absolutely still day.
All the clamour cutting out, mind and thought stream together and merge.
Fast and chattering,
now grazing boulders of distraction that bark from the valley below,
and then getting caught in the eddy of a far-distant glinting roof.
Distant hills form quiet pools where thoughts lose their way
till summoned by the brown specks below which bellow from
that thumbnail-sized green field in a sliver of grey hedge.
While you’ve listened and heard,
not a leaf, not a single leaf,
from the musk to the tip of the top of the tallest gum tree
has moved.
Not a single leaf.
Not a single stone perched on a slope has tumbled.
Not a single nothing.
Nowhere.
It’s like living in a painting, a still life, a frozen freize.
The leaning tree doesn’t fall
and cameo flowers stretch and grasp for the sun they don’t ever reach.
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The cold gathers,
it waits for the moon,
which, full and without comfort for you and me and for those little flowers,
will climb out of the trough of day
to dance and skate
gliding over
and enthralling
the night-time land.
It’s still very, very still!