Painting, Songwriting and Poetry
You should peel the skin and eat the fruit
But you discard the heart and eat the shell
You should dam the river and drink the water
But you dry up the stream and eat the dust
If a wildflower grows too high
You cut it down I don’t know why
You build the skyscrapers up to the sky
But who will cut them down or try?
Please include in real life
This foggy existence
No more than a small animal in a dusty den
Born by chance
Please include in real life
This foggy existence
No more than a field mouse
Scampering across the meadow
Born by chance
Please include in real life
This foggy existence
The spirit of breath
The beating heart
Alive by chance
Little more than a field mouse
Born by chance in a dusty den
Scampering across the meadow
Never ever seen again
A light – golden
A light – golden
more golden than the eye can detect
Follows you in, is one of you
Are more than you!
A light older than the earth
Its energy, pure, refined like love
Happiness, greater than time
Yet it is such a minor light, a little light
A feeling felt, sensed of this light
Of happiness, love bound up, glowing
Following you as you go in
But seems unseen by everyone
Invisible, is too much light to be seen by you
The secret part of light, the heat of light
Another light, a guiding fleck of light
I almost saw the form of a man
Much later, as I remember
The feeling the light had
Of guiding you, like two blind men
“At last, about time, got you here”
Not seeing it, presenting me to you
Then left or seemed to leave
Vanished into the night, hurrying away
Bowed out un-noticed by you
You stepped through the doorway
Full of yourselves, smiling professionally
You’d just about made it here not knowing why or how
And you walked in the door without a goodbye
A long-time empty in my mind
The tear has travelled a long way
A long way home to find
The heart was a long time empty
A long-time empty in my mind
Down the roads across the skies
Who knows how many times?
It lost its way and began again
A long-time empty in my mind
I miss the love I thought I knew
I miss the life I had
Like a train can lose its carriage
And rolls on feelings bad
So you cut a hole into my life
And staked me to the ground
There is no freedom in my heart
When you’re not around
The tear has travelled a long way
A long way home to the town
The shadow that I left behind
With the knife stuck in the ground
Insanity has grown in me
Insanity has grown in me
Dumb as dead dogs on broken stars
Someone filled my heart with bangers
Then closed the wound with a spiders thread
I sense my mind getting small and alone
A perpetual machine of inner war
The bit between my teeth pulls tight
I eat my screams and latch shut a smile
Is there any way back to the broken home
With the balsam of love and laughter
The broken home held together
For the sake of the children
The puppets talk to each other
The Puppets talk to each other
As they are taken out of their boxes
They are brought together on stage
They have so much fun together
Pointing their wooden fingers at each other
Laughing like parrots at the gangle of days
See them in the pub on a Friday night
Sitting at tables in the scoured moonlight
Tangled up in rope-dreams
Talking about Mr. Polly and swinging their clubs
Strangling Mr Policeman and breaking their mugs
While I sit alone all-day-long under a star
It might have rained
It might have rained a little
The blackbirds would be singing
The moon would be like a large shiny eye
A couple might have been arguing
A cart might have passed me by
A teenager drunk on wine singing
And there I stood, outside the window
Looking up, trying to catch what was being said
Glimpsing their shadows cast by the lamps onto the ceiling
I am backtracking
I am backtracking through my mistakes
To my days of innocence
I am backtracking thru the darkness
To my days of naivety
What a great forest I find myself in
How lost I am in my own mistakes
I want those days of innocence
When normal life was possible
When my heart was whole
When love was just one day away
Those six-sided days of childhood
That became twisted out of shape like a rubric cube
My blood does not compare to the sea
There is a hole in my wrist
The waves lap all around me
My blood does not compare to the sea
It could never fill the ocean
I will build a red sandcastle
I will build its walls around me
I will fill its moat with my blood
So that no more harm will come to me
Now here is my own river
Flowing from my heart into the sea
On either side, weeping willows grow
As you sail your ships into my dreams
I am the flood of truth
I am the flood of truth flowing along with the seaweed
Looking for a weakness in your defensive levees
Oh, big city of pillories where do you hide your mistakes
The binocular eyed seagulls fly over you
The dolphins hear your conspiracies
Yesterday, the rain filled your streets
There, at last, is the full moon
The levee wall is breached
The floodwater fills your ministries
Out with the lies and deceits
In with the seaweed and the sewage
Now the rivers will be freed
Now the clock tower will be silenced
And all the northern people
The ones who you intimidate
Will look down from
On how you were dealt with and recrimination
It is night, in the drizzle the street lights shine
The river writhes through London from a mountain of brooding sky.
Everything is silent in the town
A breeze, a wind; the moon peeks from behind a column of smoke
There are bridges, the bridges of London.
Tonight I have crossed every one
Drifting like a cloud from some far sea;
Legs, rain and street lights are jumbled
On the great treacle black back of the Thames.
I carry a sleepy eye over the humped back bridges
As the river slides beneath like a slow black cat.
I awake from sleep under the thin winter sky
Sparrows of cold air flit by me.
The morning sands of humanity pour across the passes
Like the Persian army at the pass of Thermopylae.
The road went through a subway of bad dreaming
Cars came to a final end and love lost all meaning.
Time became a spectre that crossed from life to death
Time seizes control of your travels, to recompense its loss.
Were you wrong in what you said? Were you out of depth?
Who speaks up for you? Was there anything left?
The thread of sinister shadow reaches in with lacerations.
Perils have crossed over you, led by accusations.
Cruelly you lived long enough, surely you asked why
The secret arose over you, why were you meant to die?
The contestants are gathered in the town square somewhere on the Midwest plains. The master of ceremonies arrives.
Years before the game began the beginnings of long strips of coloured plastic tape were laid down into the square that stretched for miles out across the land and into the Rocky Mountains. Each tape chose its contestant by a secretive whisper that only they could hear. Sometimes more than one contestant was chosen and sometimes a contestant chose more than one tape. Each tape represented a pathway of life for them o follow, an ideal, a philosophy or a plain command that would appeal to their senses, their needs for something to follow in life. Year after year new tapes representing new ideas were laid down from the town square and off into the wide distance until the thinkers had exhausted every avenue of possibility. And no on this spring morning the game would begin.
The stating whistle blew. Out of necessity quite often, the solo contestants joined together to form teams to follow the tape. in other situations but one individual would choose but one tape. In other instances some tapes got no takers and one tape led the hapless contestant in a loop back to where he began.
What philosophy, belief or practice would win? Perhaps no one would win, perhaps in the end the tape ended on the top of a mountain with nowhere else to go; or into a whirlpool of rapids where it shook nervously in the abyss. Some contestants having reached the end of the tape carried on across the Rocky Mountains into California. Some contestants returned to the town to find an unused tape.
From the sky a traveller would see a huge rainbow coloured trail stretching for miles across the land like a modern Nazca line. At the end of the year the tapes were blown by the wind and wrapped themselves around the mountains.
The master of ceremonies gathered his fees and left town but before he disappeared he gave a speech in the public square which began, “I have something to say to America”, and ended with “farewell”.
