My mother always told me to salute you,
With a brisk striking motion with my hand from the head,
The first time I ever saw you,
You lowered your head and bowed to me.

You have been despised for years I told,
For hanging around battlefields and gallows long ago,
Disturbing people with your chattering call,
When from a distance heard is unmistakable.

One morning you perched on my garden fence,
The eye in the sky shone buoyant and bright,
I was surprised you didn’t shoot off,
When the patio door slid open.

But elegant you perched on my garden fence,
I tiptoed towards you tentative and slow
And stopped and looked into your brown eyes,
I never thought I would get so close.

I stroke your velvet textured head,
My long finger tickles your oily white bust,
Your two tone colour mystifies me,
A cross between a crow and a dove.

My mother always told me you symbolise,
Bad nuns, bad priests made visible again.
You shoot off and my superstition dies –
No need to salute Magic Bird, chatter-pie.

If you had to get that drunk to **** me like you wanted it,
I think we have serious issues between us.

I don't think we'll talk about it.

Naming objects more affectionately than people,
something stupid I hate to see in others.
Mother Brain stirs the ***, and Kraid
growls infinitely, or purrs in context.

Cheap and lonely, dressed well for someone
who used to be a teenager, but in shambles and
letting it all go to **** freely and crying in joy
at incoming apocalypse.
Nuclear, biological, biblical, bubonic, revolutionary[?].

Sleep in filth, gravity feels like the proper force
we mistook for the human soul.
The center of balance is what we thought was a third eye.
We're ******* idiots is why;
we thought dreams were some kind of heaven.
The sun was god. The earth was flat. Miracles happened.

If we're being honest, we use superstition as a crutch
to elevate beyond our ****** means and pretend
everything is going to be better than what it is.
If we didn't believe in love, and god, and karma, and ghosts,
we'd all go insane from the ******* sanity.
We eat **** to wash our palette for human flesh.

We poison ourselves to imagine we live like royals.

i'm not superstitious
so i don't believe
in phantoms

but yesterday
i came face to face
with the ghost of
who i used to be

*i'm not so sure any more.

He lives his life holding a superstitious breath
And his mania is of other people’s or his death
If ever he encounters a funeral any day
He dives over a wall till it’s passed by his way.

He’ll wander round graveyards and look at the stones
And tell you the nature of the owner of the bones
For if flowers were growing he’ll tell you for free
The bones of a good person lay down underneath.
But if weeds there are growing they’d died in disgrace
For flowers could never take root in this place

He saw a white moth once fly into his home
So straight-away he said that to him death would come
And he totally refuses to call at his best friend’s flat
For he’s driven me crackers and I've bought a black cat!

©Joe Wilson – His weird mania 2014

I scribbled your number over, over and over again
on a piece of paper, hoping it would make you call
me once more and linger over a conversation longer
than two minutes and I swear I wasn't superstitious
like my mother who hated it whenever I broke mirrors
and walked under ladders; she said I was such an idiot,
I think it's catching up with me like the salty wind to our
skin during the first night you kissed me and said I was
pretty decent and it's okay if I scribble your number a thousand
more times just to hear you say that again.

I was a superstitious kid
I didn't step on the cracks
I wonder how much I hid
Behind my parents' backs.

And in a tiny way I'm still
The same as I was then
A little girl in for a thrill
Afraid of what's around the bend.

I still wonder if the moon
Affects my moods and caprice
Maybe if I had more room
To breathe, I'd find peace.