As I paint with a scarlet brush

As I paint with a scarlet brush
I receive a call
In the earphone on my head
From King Saul
Samson the Philistines are upon you
One and all

As I paint with a scarlet brush
A scarlet mark
And Jesus calls from beyond my ears
From amongst the larkspur
I stop and sit to mark what’s said
In a patterned verse of tears

As I paint with a scarlet brush
I hear so many stations
Like broken eggs inside a cup
Where I hear your voice speak out
From amongst the little yellow chicks
That run about

As I paint with a scarlet brush
My motherboard
I hear the cracking gold and diamond scream
Of St Paul
And from the bible come many sounds
Like a beavers scraping claws

As I paint with a scarlet brush
A bad egg full of tears
I answer the call you send home to me
With universal gears
And my heart pedals furiously
Holding many tactile spears

Progress on pain-ting

At first he looked like an ancient Chinese man, Confucius maybe. I was using a sketch I did from a photo of someone at a Stonehenge celebration. As it stood I could not use the drawing it didn’t seem to be something I could develop from there. I really needed to see the photo again so I had to search for it again. Now the original drawing is gone, painted over and I have a well an even stranger picture; a strange painting of a strange man at a Stonehenge festival. What is his hat, his headgear. It seems like an electronic device, I see it as the persons way of communicating with the spiritual world. A reciever maybe, a listening device, workable or not. Then he seems to have a scarlet cloak draped from his forearms, like a Roman soldiers cloak. His hair is a Rastafarian plaited hair style. And he wears sleeveless fur jacket.

Well here I am making a painting of a subject that normal people will not consider putting on their wall. It might never have a chance of a new home anywhere, ever. I’d be better off painting a vase of roses.

I imagine though an interesting man going on a spiritual journey searching for something, going where the wind takes him, unafraid to explore the unknowable world around him.

Each painting I do seems to effect me somehow. The more I get absorbed in it the more I think and feel about it, the more I have to change to know it, to paint it truthfully as I can. That’s why at first, the picture had only it’s surface value. My drawing then was a fault, I had found a subject that was of interest but I had been typically superficial about it.

I spend more time just looking at it than painting it. What do artist do all day goes the blurb. Am I even an artist, I don’t know. Society and me are miles apart.

The wooden idol wants to write a diary

The wooden idol wants to write a diary
The wooden idol looks inside itself and writes from its heat
With fingers that cannot hold the borrowed pencil

Visitors come to see the wooden idol
They bow down, pray to it, and go away

The wooden idol
Writes down its thoughts on wood
The wooden idols thoughts appear written all over its body

People come to see the miracle
They bow down and they pray to it and ask
What does the writing mean for no one can read the writing?

The wooden idol is shipped off to a laboratory to be examined
A scan shows up nothing but the rings of a tree
The writing is copied into a file and printed out
An expert declares it to be an unknown language

The idol is retuned to the place of worship
People come and bow down to it and leave

If the idol wanted to remember its past life
What could it remember
Was it a man or a woman?
Did it fall in love?
The idol is confused
What it remembers is being in a forest
What it is now is a woman carved out of wood

The idol realises that it is not a real woman
The idol realises that a carving in wood is not its real identity
In its memory it sees only trees in a forest
And now it is this – an idol

The idol feels misunderstood
The idol wants them to move it back into the forest
The idol cannot speak to them as they worship it

Do they like it because it is wood
Or because it has been given a shape they can understand?

The idol might have roots inside it
If the idol could be returned to the forest
It just might put down roots
It just might become a tree again

In the course of a lifetime
We can often swallow an idol
We are going through a level of personality disorder that we cannot control
We enter a bad night with a dark lake within
Out of the dark lake comes the idol that we swallow
We have an excess of ego
We get an overflow of emotions
We walk through a darkness of the heart and soul
Our spirit feels threatened n it fights back
You can imagine a spirit that fights back
But you cannot see it yet it is fights on your behalf
It is anonymous, it is like water and air, it has no identity
It has the energy of life
And it fights back against the influences you experience

I want to delete all this and find my true self
I am afraid
I pretend to be who you want me to be
It’s your fault
You have fashioned something that does not fit

When I try to be my true self, I do not fit
I was shaped like everyone else to fit in
But I am not a follower made of wood

I am sailing in the fingerprint of my soul
I see with the iris of my eye
My heart beats for its own length of time in so many different ways to yours
I cannot be squeezed into a tin can
I am not a commodity

There is a game that is played in society
Where you run around a course and images pop up
Some images are enemies for you to kill
Some images are commodities for you to buy

Everything a person makes becomes one or the other
Even with the best will in the world
– Art becomes a commodity
– Athleticism becomes a national asset
And truth becomes smoke

Lady prophecy

Lady
Prophecy
Lies
In her grave

People forget
She’s gone now
People forget
Her name

But sometimes
In a mirror
That appears
In the sky

People seem to shiver
As a bird flies by

Lady prophecy
Dead
A million hours
She’s there
Beneath the flowers
So unreal

But sometimes
In blue water
A spirit sees his daughter
And he cries
And he cries

Lady
Prophecy
They search
For the door
To thee

They open up the door to see
Whatever will
Have to be
Kay sa rar, sa rar
Kay sa rar sa rar

The bridge

The bridge is getting higher
It goes above the sky
So how can I cross the river
Or get to the other side

The rivers getting faster
Flowing back into the past
So how can I cross the river
To the land that always lasts

Time has up and died
It ended in my eyes
So how can I cross the river
When I can neither live nor die

God has made the river flow
Faster than I’d even know
Further than the sea
Higher than the snow

Memories are dancing
They never even sink
Only they can cross the river
Only they can cross the brink

This must be the wasteland

This must be the wasteland
That I walk upon
Funny how it first appeared
Funny now it’s gone
Covered now by bird wings
That fly and sing their song
This must be the wasteland
That I walk upon

A hundred years ago
There was a battle here
The sky alone remembers
The blood washed down by tears
Covered now by visions
That the angels left behind
This must be a wasteland
That I walk upon

This must be the wasteland
That bloody awful battleground
This is where the waste ground
Consumed in fire
Look at it now –
And do not cry
This must be the wasteland that I’m on

This must be the wasteland
Converted into farmland
Funny how it still seems bad
To walk here and not feel sad
Covered over now by gravestones
Windblown corpses all alone
This must be the wasteland
That I’m on

Half empty, or half full?

The world is worried by climate change and sees things in half-empty mode. However, there can be good things happening as the climate changes, half-full.
With the glaciers melting and the snow on the mountaintops also melting, a messianic prophecy about wheat growing on the mountaintops could become a reality. Psalm 72:16, May there be abundance of grain in the earth on top of the mountains. (also Isaiah 41: 17-20).

A dream theatre

You enter the theatre and you find your place
The setting is in darkness
A lion like beast can be seen skulking y the far edge
It is attacked by another larger beast
This image of violence takes centre stage now
The second beast is on the back of the first
Sinking its sharp fangs into the nape of the first ones neck
It will not die quickly
The second beast bites harder and harder

A jeer goes up
Don’t let the first beast die like this

They somehow float up into the sky
Some men maybe angels come to the rescue
One takes the front paw of the second beast
One takes the other paw and they pull the limbs in opposite directions

The second beast has to let go now
As soon as it is pulled off of the first beast
An explosion above our heads
Both beasts seem to have exploded
Fire and charcoal and soot rain down on our heads
The curtain closes

Wipe away the past and start again

Wipe away the past and start again
Living life as if we’re aged only nine or ten
When we’d hardly heard of armies, parties of famous men
And the just wars were an unknown sea in a camera lens

Remembering how slow was the pace of the human race
And in between our steps the wild flowers grow
And there was time to look at one another without any haste
And to find out all you needed to know

Nowadays only the wind has time to rest
On a quiet day it settles in the empty sparrows nest
While man will climb over each other’s backs
In the race to get to the moon and back

So wipe away the past and start again
Begin without the walls that we’ve had to defend
Start as if the rain had just gone away
Start again and build a brand new day

Or soon there’ll be no time to write a song
Fall in love or learn how to belong
Or soon there’ll be no time to look at the stars
Or play children’s games or have children’s fun

Life goes into the conjurer’s cabinet

Life goes into the conjurer’s cabinet and he cuts it in two. You run to get the bus. He opens the cabinet to show the head smiling, the feet wriggling. You run through a glass arcade of night. The children watch in awe. On the work shop floor you run like a shackled puppet through buzz saws of all emotion and emerge in slices. Children’s games are all that’s left that’s whole.

A ship is made of two eyelids that open up the sky and an enormous eyeball stares down at you. Do you see the conveyer belt that the sunlight arrives on. The wind blows a large leaf into your face. With a pair of scissors you cut the moon out of the sky and paste it into your pillow book. Higher and higher you go as if separated from the earth. Your bank balance is exhausted and you fall suddenly into the swimming pool.