Reflection: Notting Hill, 1968

Years away in those wild days and time was not an issue
when an eternity of hopefulness stretched onwards
and memories were not yet cruel captors.
Then we had no past to speak of and the future was of dubious concern.
In the high, wild days of that brief halcyon,
we were freer than we knew or ever would be all our lives;
our hearts blissfully unencumbered
and our minds
were seldom mindful of the later rotten preconceptions,
preferring, then, to trust our new-born liberties
to Leary-induced reflections on the holy scriptures preached
by Hendrix, Kerouac and Baudelaire.
Always drunk – that’s it!
Drunk on our own exuberance, impertinence
and arrogant imaginings,
drinking in the seedy, sweating nights
of Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove,
where couplings were short and inconclusive,
in artless striving between unremembered thighs,
but lovely, too, in light of retrospective mornings
as cracks of heavy sun broke through the basement railings
into rooms of tossed, disordered minds
where scents of Lebanon hung warm and sweet
to our naked senses
and patchouli-infused clothing lay strewn across the floor.