Rejection of Word

 

This is... Rejection of Word

I need to express views

And only a primal scream will do.

Crack the iron lung with a monstrous breath.

Make you feel what I feel.

I exist in persistent heaven and perpetual hell.

The snake might be the lowest.

But a snake can rattle like a poet.

Obsession, addiction, consumption, confession.

Never reaching satisfaction.

And what!

If I create

A  correction of God's mistake.

And what?

So the creature has to suffer.

As warning to all others.

A curse in chorus:

"Here's what you get when you loose

God's anchor from the rules"

God is Captain and man, sailor

On the Ship of Fools.

No souls are swept overboard.

God won't toss a lifebuoy out into the shoals.

For man-made creatures like me.

As I go under, 

I'll be a thing of wonder.

Take myself to the grave.

Protect yourself, there are people

 

Protect yourself, there are people

There is a she wolf howling at the moon.

Howling at anything looking like the moon.

In her teeth she's tossing about the body.

Tearing insides from out of the body.

Jolting the body into motion.

It doesn't matter who's blood she's drawing,

Doesn't matter the black crow cawing.

Instinct and wolf spit only.

I can smoke pensively, if it helps you.

There is a soul worn thread thin.

Tattered knot bloodshot insane bone saw.

Bone instrument.

In it for the love of the game, not the win.

Litheness stiffened and voice rottened long ago.

It's a snake wearing my skin.

Forcing reanimation.

Jolting the body into ritual.

I lurch and I growl.

Instinct and wolf spit only.

I can do more or less, if it helps you.

I want to lay perfectly still, flat as moonlight.

I want the impression in flesh from fallen pines.

I want damp dirt squeezed between my fingers.

I want the sick storm to pass over, nothing to

Jolt my body into earthly communion.

I want to hoist my flag in omnipotent surrenders.

But it's not unstained, barely white now.

Instinct and wolf spit only.

Torture back garden

This is... Torture back garden

I read in the latest Lady's Flora Gazette

Plant life know when they are being eaten.

"I am being eaten"

Fucking Hell.

They say to the other plants around them:

"I am being eaten"

Fuck Me.

To warn them the latex sheen bug is taking bites.

"Assume the brace position"

My God.

You may still be identifiable by your thorns.

I read in a botanist research paper

Plant life count bees as a concept of time.

"It is time again"

Jesus, yes.

They listen out for the buzz-buzz-buzz-buzz

"It is time again"

Holy fuck.

Recognising the individual style of sting.

"Assume the brace position"

My God.

Count the blessings for the bee and the whip.

This picture is a storm

 This is.... This picture is a storm

Light running off jaded surfaces.

Low notes tumbling on and on.

Leather rain drops on skin.

Tendu and sculpted silver lined limbs.

This storm a slow ballet, now whips.

Sensual, morbid clouds catch in shock.

Guts spilling.

Oil sleaze spittle drooling.

Moans distorting in twists and turns.

Talking in tongues. 

Portamento slurring 

Dragging contretemps

Bouncing, drenching spray.

Snarling attack dog at prey.

This storm becomes all consolation.

Porcelain ghosts in the cemetery.

A whorl wind of reminders buffet the stones 

In the eye the sublime of the meaningless.

The beauty of the blankness.

Like smudges on the picture of Dorian Grey,

Colour pops from tones of gloom.

Lines stretch way on to far off doom,

Drawn from flesh and bone,

Breathless curses, soaked.

But this onyx portrait is so very still-life, it is a mirror.

Brush strokes weights like a mourner's overcoat.

Lithe leg and heel steps out the frame.

Candle flames all blown out

This storm is a terror!

I'm not throwing up because of my addiction, I'm throwing up because of what I'm addicted to

 

This is....

I'm not throwing up because of my addiction, I'm throwing up because of what I'm addicted to

Fear don't fail me now.

Fear be a tortured preacher.

Civility be a skeletal creature.

And I will die of complications.

Blind luck or dumb misfortune got me here.

Hanging like cat's cradle on hot tin roof.

Where I pretend like I'm not a product

of necessitations.

And I will die of complications.

 

Barely holding to the filthy midnight

sickly moonlight cobweb sail.

It just won't catch the wind on these oceans.

And I will die of complications.

Because life is about taking positions.

Putting bodies where they need to be.

The symptom not disease

Will cause me

To die of complications.

 

For someone what was will always be.

For someone what is will never be.

It's happening perfectly.

We absorb and spill out transcendence.

We caught each other's eye.

The ground beneath did not split apart,

to my surprise, I'm surprised.

I've been circling you circling myself

Bringing hindsight to a Prior Fight.

Duelling pistols drawn to our backs.

Reincarnation is something I can do without.

I study, appalled, at what once was there,

disgusted at what I now present.

I voice: "What's dead is dead, for all I care!"

But I don't really believe in it,

Nor in astrological confessions.

The stars align:

I will die of complications.

 

Sunlight shines through a petal.

The moonlight chills the bud.

Foxes aren't nocturnal

Instinctively they know the safest light to hunt.

And what is consciousness

If not a signal received from the mothership?

"So, let's get down to business

While we still can raise ourselves to the cause"

But I can't understand their insinuations

The winner doesn't change

Between philosophy and human remains

My death by complications

And what of apparitions

If not broadcasts intercepted from outer space?

Because the best of us are detuned actualisations

Never in quite the right time or place.

Just by being we distort the natural law

Resisting the inevitable,

the human conditions, the societal manipulations

Causing us to die of complications.

They're coming to get you, Barbara

I don't rightly know when, but I've found myself fascinated by the very personal micro-history one creates.

This is... They're coming to get you, Barbara

Those wild floral hours.

That morning complexion of a first kiss.

Bird song, tart as berries.

Now the late bloom buds never were as red.

They're coming to get you, Barbara.

Pressed meadow flowers laid along slender forearms

and dirty upturned palms.

As the sun loves the shine.

Sweat clings to this scent like a dress.

Smudged mascara, smoked breath.

How many nights has it wore on until dawn?

They're coming to get you, Barbara.

Clawing out. Ancient. Ruin. Fossil. Contorting, sleekit.

Midwinter creepit.

They are always coming to get you, Barbara.

And they're growing in number.

Trying to consume you with their crimes.

The lives you led trying to wipe out.

You've wondered lately.

How easy it can be to fall off the horizon.

How a round world has straight edges.

Are they gaining now, is the trail ahead ledges?

They're coming to get you, Barbara.

With wet church glass eyes blinking at you existing

Don't look behind, keep running.

They are always coming to get you, Barbara.

And they're growing in number.

Rising from earth of your half remembered form.

They are the harvest and the swarm.

They are always coming to get you, Barbara.

And they're growing in number.

You can't replant a tree as a seed, only chop them down.

The woodland  you're in is your own.

William Blake, Jimi Hendrix, Marilyn Munroe.

Vonnegut, Brecht, Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe.

Sharon Tate, Bach, Plath, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

A shape out of town, counting down

This took me the longest time to write. I wrote a whole other piece just to pick this one out from the dust it left.

This is...
A shape out of town, counting down

I deal in moonshine truths.

Love and Loss are the only meters of the soul,

Where the scales are counting chambers.

There’s a very old shape out of town.

And it is counting down.

I don’t do whimsy, or metaphors told.

It is my blood that’s bad.

My heart that's dirty.

It’s my skin that craves.

Confusing lack of sleep

with keeping thin.

I’m a believer,

Just not of what you are in.

Was this it? 

Was this all you could muster? 

Was this all it took?

To sate your bad blood.

Jump your dirty heart.

Satisfy your craving skin.

This is meant to be temporary, you know.

A Perishing Lament

Greville and the Tombstones are not very good at Halloween. But this little one seems appropriate for reading on a Halloween night. Listen and you might hear it through the wind, through the window, through the wall, through to morning.

This is:
A Perishing Lament

It’s not what fleshes our costumes.

It’s not the glow of a lantern,

flickering a face through a windowpane.

It’s a peculiarity which consumes.

A gothic, sloshing, formed within.

It’s an invisible foreboding without name.

It’s joining in a parlour game,

All silk dresses, paraffin lights and warm. 

And sensing not all is tomfoolery intent,

Disguised by cinder toffee scent.  

And the spirit moves on from you. 

And the spirit moves on

Because of what you have done.  

Watching players all sat in the round.

The Medium’s fingers of reed,

Flickering in refined ethereal breeze.

Listening out for your mortal sound.

The channelling is meant to mislead.

The panting in breasts as breaths freeze.

We’re joining your parlour game.

All creaks, knocks and earie manifest.

And moaning out eternal undying torment,

It’s a perishing lament.

And the spirit does rest with you.

And the spirit does rest

Because of what you have done.

Hard where it counts

Anita Berber by Madame D'Ora Atelier 1922

Inspired by a line which resonated with me from David Lynch in Twin Peaks, this is...

Hard where it counts

You can’t have rainbows without rain.

I can do without rainbows.

To err humanity, forgiveness divinity.

Lord knows I was mistaken.

Getting soft all over the damn place.

Bless you, we are all dying.

I’m still hard where it counts.

Curse behind the white picket fence

Greville and the Tombstones are not an imaginary protest folk band, Greville and the Tombstones are an alt-gothic band that doesn't exist.

These lyrics took 2 months to write. Only in the past week have they revealed themselves to be a gothic protest song.

Perhaps it's Greville and the Tombstones absorbing the zeitgeist of the times and projecting it through it's prism.

Perhaps it's simply a horror story that isn't real.




This is:
Curse behind the white picket fence

It doesn’t matter what was said,

Or what is going to be said next.

ALEA IACTA EST

Only flowers transform in one place.

And the dead.  

You’re shrivelled of the soul.

I wish you to wither under your own failing toll.

There is no art to you.

And if nobody cares,

then why do I need to forgive myself to you?

And if nobody cares under this sun,

Then who else is left to do

what needs to be

done?

Claim to be a leader, a learner, a teacher.

This is not where the strengths lie.

They're in arrogance and to blunt falsify.

Why make of altruism not being a game.

Then play a deck hand where losers drown.

For to appear elevated, hand slyly pushes down.

I know the Godless: biology without faith.

Like a watch which needs wound every day,

there are times even the

faithless should

pray.

Don’t gift me life, bring me a death scene

of twisted character traits

and compound fractured debates.

When an arm is needed tight around despair,

a broken one is useless there.

All you are, all you do

will ossify, mulch and turn to mildew.

Like roses you cut when they beautifully

grew.

Crows protect us from your flight.

Glare from the graveyard to the above

feathery night,

shelter us from the hellish dove.

Then why do we need to forgive you with love?

When our raging love career at hanging night,

an abrasion of rain at your

execution.

Your white picket fence is riddled with woodworm

No more protecting, no more holding firm.

I am scraping at the posts,

With my

thorns.

Death of a personality cult leader

Some of Greville and the Tombstones works are simple alt-gothic romances, some trying to solidify alt-gothic fears into something understandable. Most are personal favourites of the band.

This one? This one, I'm not sure. I think this one will be benefiting from a writer's alt-gothic commentary.

But it is certainly a Greville and the Tombstones song.

So I really hope you like it!











This is our new track. This is:

Death of a Personality Cult Leader

Temperance is scraping the gristle,

Wooden spoon judders over gum flesh.

Eyes are brittle.

Hardened by all the things they’ve laid gaze upon.

But not insensitive enough not to notice how

Youth smoulders into something older,

Flat smoke dries the fruit,

An acrid shrove

Wear your robes of high grandeur,

Personality cult leader.

After all, it’s your skin.

Thread your gold letters too,

Sew them in.

Impress the chosen few.

You gargle with the blood of followers,

You bathe in freshly dug grave dirt.

My and my, and you’re pretty.

“Listen to how important I am with my noise!”

Give me attention!

The validation!

Appraiser of piety!

“I render those sick, and enjoy the withering!”

I exist, don't deny it!

Spent life in a temple to greatness.

Death is a box.

And this, don't doubt it!

A verdict on devoutness projected on a chamber wall!

A verdict against this personality cult laid gaze upon.

Not ever insensitive enough not to notice how:

Candles burn fast in a cold standing draft

Bitter warmth of the hollow,

And goddamn, you’re pretty

COMPUSERVE poem for a fibre optic person

Greville and the Tombstones are not known for the modern style, but this track has been heavily influenced by my reading of works of the young poets of these days. They are so damn cool and produce poetry with aching, razor titles.

Read some Clementine von Radics.

My belief is that this track by Greville and the Tombstones remains very much waiting for you at the alt-gothic crypt, so don’t worry. Greville and the Tombstones still travel to their gigs by black carriage. (#therearenogigs)

But... the whole lyric can be put in a “tweet”, or printed out on a t-shirt in Comic Sans on a very reasonable student budget to wear at lectures, and it would make a perfect tattoo to impress a sweetheart.

It’s a desperate plea to someone in a void of disconsolation.


It's titled:
COMPUSERVE poem for a fibre optic person

  NevR… do n’t go…

Eve N in the terrors

All will be well … B well

…;

Coffin Blues (screen shot version)

Here is a little treat for Greville and the Tombstones fans (#therearenofans ... no, wait... that's not right).

This is the screen shot version of...

The Coffin Blues

#thereisnoband

I'm Gonna Scare the Man In The Moon

Here is a Halloween track release.

I've always loved Halloween. A Christmas for one's wild side. Lighting ghoulish faced lanterns, playing sticky games and dressing up in scary homemade costumes. Ghosts and witches were the classic costumes, weren't they?

Nowadays it's all sexy nurses and sensual bats and seductive CSI Technicians.

Yes, you can keep your zombie cheerleaders and your play boy devil bunnies. A witch is who I want to be creeping me out under the full moon on All Hallows Eve.

Anyway, I hope you all have a fan(g)tastic and terr(or)ific night and enjoy this lyric. Oh! and remember: the monsters are not in your head. That noise in the other room is something you might not want to investigate until morning.


Anyway, here it is... It's called:

I'm Gonna Scare the Man In The Moon

I’ve been thinking lately, about my grave mortality

About birth and death, and what lies between

Is just earth and breath and Halloween

I’ve been looking up lately, at the man in the moon

“A charlatan faker”, his mean light does accuse

“Lovers’ taker of esteem be your muse”

I’ve been plotting lately, how I’m gonna show him

They really care, and I can find love in their tune

Yeah, I’m gonna scare the man in the moon

I’m gonna scare the man in the moon

Carve the sun

Into a jack-o-lantern

Shine it down onto his face soon

I’m gonna scare the man in the moon

I’ve been grieving lately, on my life’s weed full pathway

Moments passed, opportunities I have betrayed

On all of the fast, tease decisions I’ve made

I’ve been looking up lately, at the man in the moon

His pale grey eyes, shine right down round me,

“witch the flies time night, wary always Be”

I’ve been waiting up lately, long for my right of reply

My lover tells, man in the moon’s tricks are sly

“Witches cast spells, need broomsticks to fly”

I’m gonna scare the man in the moon

Carve the sun

Into a jack-o-lantern

Shine it down onto his face soon

I’m gonna scare the man in the moon

Join me in moonlight, there’s nothing to fear

With you, dear, I could be sincere

I’m gonna scare the man in the moon

With razor teeth

Wizened heart underneath

Like a rotten bud after the bloom

I’m gonna scare the man in the moon

I’ve not been sleeping lately, dwelling on my grave mortality

About birth and death and sorrow, and what lies between

Is just earth and breath we borrow, and Halloween

Well I’m gonna scare the man in the moon

His light gleams onto my impenetrable gloom

Thanks to my amazing Twitter followers for posting me pictures of sultry witches when I asked for help. They inspired me!

God created you mortal but I can sort that, baby

Although the second album is mainly about the new, fan alienating sound, I am not Radiohead and so here is a song kind of more in the style of the old, popular stuff.

I like to think that the protagonist in this sweet put lyric is not a scientist with a lab at all, but a Saturday store assistant in Argos with a large store room (an Argos Extra?) who has had too much opportunity to think about the big questions in life between collection points and as a result has gone a bit odd.

I give you:

God created you mortal but I can sort that, Baby

God had all the elements to hand

Rolling atomic particles smaller than grains of sand

Thrown into the void, they were set free

Eventually some of them combined and fused to make you and me

What if we’re not a product of design?

What if all this is just an experiment: X over time?

What if God cares not of your life or mine?

What if God is a Scientist, we mistake notes in jotters as divine?

Made with a timer so we'll all eventually die

Life is so simple to stop and squeeze out a last sigh

Innards fail, madness prevails in milky eye

A scientist needs to find a God Clock vaccine and that scientist is I

God created you mortal but I can sort that, Baby

God didn’t make you immortal, but I can if you’d let me

I can put a glass panel in your abdomen bare

Doctors will see your organs healthy pink with no tare

You’ll live forever so long as days remain fair

If you’ll only let me sew solar panels into your long greying hair

God created you mortal but I can sort that, Baby

God didn’t make you immortal, but I can if you’d let me

I’ll replace weak flesh muscle for a carbonate part

Giving you motion, a 12 volt battery is only the start

I’ve planned you out on a systematic Gantt chart

Shockproof wheels, springs, pistons and brass valves for a heart

God created you mortal but I can sort that, Baby

God didn’t make you immortal, but I can if you’d let me

But if you're to survive, you first need the cut of my knife

Death’s never solved in stories without elegant sacrifice

For you to live, I need to cut out God's clock

Replace it with one I have in the back, from my own stock

God created you mortal but I can sort that, Baby

Live! Live!

I couldn’t stand myself thinking of saying goodbye

I kept you in my lab, knowing Death was a goddamn lie

Stab! Stab! Have to find your clock as moments tick by

As life flows in tubed osmosis, I think I see you leak out a cry

And I cry too,

You see I'm giving you the last clock in store,

Not sure we'll get in any more

I now have someone like you to live for,

So my inevitable death is cruel

I Don’t Want to Go Off to the Land Of Nod

Hey guys!
If I was recording an alt-gothic album this would be the lyrics for a song on it.
They would be inspired by the arty-doodles of @QuirkyJoe_
They would have this review by @jaffne:
"I am awfully concerned by this...all my childhood sweet dreams and lullabies, twisted! I fear I shall never sleep again! It's like Bucks Fizz's Land of Make Believe, but with a serial killer lurking even more menacingly! *weeps*"

Yip - this would be it, alright:

I Don’t Want to Go Off to the Land Of Nod

I don’t want to go off to the land of Nod,

That’s where the monsters are

They creep, wait and chase me far

If they catch me,

My bones will be gnawed

At dusk I hear the death rattle windows,

World full of creaks and wheeze

Rain drips slow from misery trees

Night winds gust

With malignant blows

Sleep is out where Alien pessimism goes

They stare at me with objective eyes

They experiment to weigh out lives

Then fly away sadly,

In blue Martian UFO’s

No I don’t want to go to the land of Nod

The land of Nod is reached only by some

A Time split alternate universe

A poisoned fog, an evil drawn hearse

It is the landscape

Where the creatures run

When I sleep deepest I talk to the Dead

Past time Folks come to me

I say my peace to set them all free

To non-listening,

Ghosting Extants in my head

I don’t want to go off to the land of Nod

Please don’t take me there,

Place of dark shadow being’s lair

Where nothing is

Without Sense of odd

Night light of the light house, lead me to the shore,

I have had enough of crashing on the rocks

I don’t let the Sandman get too close

Sits in a tower block with a gun

He takes pot-shots at me for fun

Drinking nightcaps

In bloody nightclothes

When I close both eyes I see my dream

She’s lovely, stung lipped and fair

But she’s a soulless nightmare

Just a chemical mix

Of orange and green

I don’t want to go off to the land of Nod

All things in my skull reside here

Everything I suppress in fear

Expressions of all

The ways I am flawed

No I don’t want to go to the land of Nod

Night light of the light house! Sweep weak light around!

I have had enough of falling on the rocks

I don’t want to go off to the land of Nod

That’s where the monsters are

Lurking in labyrinths most bizarre

Razor walls slashed

Nights’ grey fabric clawed

I don’t want to go off to the land of Nod

That’s where the monsters are

They creep, wait and chase me far

If they catch me,

My bones will be gnawed

I don’t want to go off to the land of Nod,

I’ll take pills, sup caffeine too

I’ll transfuse all my sleep into you

If they catch you,

Your bones will be gnawed

I won’t go back to the land of Nod

….

….

Dictaphone’s choppy, cracklingly muffled recording:

[Sexy psychiatrist lady voice] So what was it this time?

[Greville Tombs] Paper dinosaurs and goblin zombie wars. Doctor, what does it mean?

[Sexy psychiatrist lady voice] I can’t tell you, we are both in your dream

But, of course, there is no album - so none of this technically ever really happened.