We sipped mushroom tea with lemon,
While reading French Tarot.
We brunched at half eleven,
And then traipsed to and fro.

The rainbow sands were shades of brown;
The shellfish tide, blood red.
The white sunlight erased the ground,
But we marched straight ahead.

The ladies spoke of Sultan Steve,
And his hobby canoe.
“I have no time to grant reprieve,
My thwart has gone askew.”

We veered for Tigh-Na-Mara,
Stomped tide pools on the way,
And turned around once we had reached,
The Penzance trebuchet.

The ladies looked for licorice creams,
And drifted out of sight.
We sat to chat and talk of dreams,
And watch the clouds in flight.

He counted logs as he walked by,
And gave a name to each.
We listened to the purple sky,
And Nixon on the beach.

“How needlessly reductive,
To name all that has none.
Our man Nixon is friendly,
But he’s not very fun.”

We wandered back into the camp,
To sit and play with fire.
The ladies rolled a joint to tamp.
The mushrooms had expired.

This isn’t the poem I’ve been talking about, just one that’s been in the back of my mind. It’s roughly in ballad form, which means the first and third lines of each stanza have four iambs and the second and fourth have three. I deviated from this where I felt the rhythm dictated (usually where I end a line with a three-syllable word). Rhymes skip lines, mostly, but hopefully that’s obvious.