Turn back!
Turn back!
Don’t turn your back on us
Heading for the unreality
We cannot see
We cannot hear
How some of us needed you
Listening to a gift from the aethers
Clutching the album
Identifying iconic faces
And no more misheard lyrics
As words from every song
Danced across the back
Of that magical Sgt. Pepper sleeve
Containing the holy grail of the 60s
Black words on red
And we wondered
WTH are “plasticine porters”?
Who needed drugs
With your reality becoming ours
Through music and glorious words
Sitar sounds “Within You Without You”
Endless chord of “A Day in the Life”
“A Little Help From My Friends”
(Why do I always see and hear Joe Cocker there?}
And when I finally turned 64
Numberless decades later
It became my birthday song
But you turned on us
I know, you had to do it
You all had to be free but
Just wish you’d been like the Stones
Together until the end
I’m sure they’ll be
So I stare at this alternative photo
As you reveal that it was all a dream
But no matter because
Your words were truth
So very long ago…
© 2020 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGE: Alternative Sgt. Pepper cover
“Picture yourself on a train in a station
With plasticine porters with looking glass ties
Suddenly someone is there at the turnstile
The girl with the kaleidoscope eyes”–Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds
From Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album
poeturja 