John Lennon Instagram – ACROSS THE UNIVERSE. 🔵 It’s one of the best lyrics I’ve written. In fact, it could be the best. It’s good poetry, or whatever you call it, without chewing it. See, the ones I like are the ones that stand as words without melody. They don’t have to have any melody, like a poem you can read them. I was lying next to my first wife in bed, you know, and I was irritated. She must have been going on and on about something and she’d gone to sleep and I’d kept hearing these words over and over, flowing like an endless stream. I went downstairs and it turned into sort of a cosmic song rather than an irritated song, rather than a, ‘Why are you always mouthing off at me?’ or whatever, right? But the words stand, luckily, by themselves. They were purely inspirational and were given to me as ‘boom!’ I don’t own it, you know; it came through like that. I don’t know where it came from, what meter it’s in, and I’ve sat down and looked at it and said, ‘Can I write another one with this meter?’ It’s so interesting: ‘Words are flying out like endless rain into a paper cup, they slither while they pass they slip away across the universe.’ Such an extraordinary meter and I can never repeat it! It’s not a matter of craftsmanship, it wrote itself. It drove me out of bed. I didn’t want to write it, I was just slightly irritable and I went downstairs and I couldn’t get to sleep until I put it on paper, and then I went to sleep. It’s like being possessed, like a psychic or a medium. The thing has to go down. It won’t let you sleep, so you have to get up, make it into something, and then you’re allowed to sleep. That’s always in the middle of the bloody night, when you’re half awake or tired and your critical facilities are switched off.