HOCKNEY
High in the Hollywood hills
In the shadows of Sunset Boulevard
Hockney is dabbling again.
A copy of Mulholland Drive rests against the studio wall;
Outside, the land drops away;
A jungle of exotic palms and ferns
With a swimming pool at the bottom
Not much used anymore.
He doesn’t go out much these days, he says;
‘I go to the dentist , the doctor, the bookstore
And the marijuana store
And that’s about it.
I’m much too deaf to go out
I don’t really have a social life
Because socialising is talking and listening
And I can’t really listen any more’.
Okay David,
But really, the marijuana store!
I wonder if it’s the one on Venice beach
Where the aged musculatorians of Muscle beach
Tramp with regularity to the nearby marijuana clinic
To see the marijuana doctors,
In their neat green cross uniforms,
Who will prescribe some medical marijuana
For forty bucks
Or thereabouts
To anybody who needs it.
When I’m working again I feel thirty,
And when I smoke I feel like Picasso, he says
Yeah, David, okay
But that’s not the work
That’s the weed.