It's important for every poet to die

When the girl is in the room, I'll change the "she"s to "you"s and "her"s to "your"s.

This is: It’s important for every poet to die

You know what it was?

It was a primal snarl to God.

I have finite breath for God’s infinite listening.  

You know what this is?

It is my regret like a chainsaw.

Taken to the soft between ribcage and pelvis.  

You know what this will be?

It will be an upstairs room therapy.

As long as I fuel it with muse effigies of you.  

A girl, I guess, wants her heart poured over

By hot murmurs of a poet who feels death.

Such is death’s thinness.

Wants her nerves candle wax bathed

By a poet’s proof of conditions all meaningless.

Such is life’s thinness.

Wants her hair intimately tousled

By poetry which won’t sicken alongside her aging,

Such is youth's thinness.  

It strikes me right now,

In the dreary twilight point before sleep:

Where we laid in sweet evening figary, absorbed in each other

When she wrapped her cotton polyester mix legs around my leg

I realise right now she was Joan Baez.

But I thought Joan Baez sang Big Yellow Taxi.  

It’s important for every poet to die.

No girl wants the snarling to thin.

I wrote this super-fast on the occasion of the super-moon

Sometimes a title says it all.

This is: I wrote this super-fast on the occasion of the super-moon

“Moon of my Delight”.

An age recorded soundbite.

I echo out from time to time.

Listening for any sign.

From way out… there.

Nothing comes by or care.  

That satellite line: “Moon of my Delight”.

Then in the woods last night,

As night was closing,

The sea was dozing,

Riding on a frosty leaf did fly,

A beautiful whisper in reply.  

Like an astronomer first hearing a message from static light-years.

Stumbling, unable to comprehend what suddenly clears.  

“Moon of my Delight”

Goddess from starlight

Tore forward the infinite sky

On a golden chariot from high

Called “Gloria!”

And the breeze it swept chorused “Gloria!”  

Crescent wings in long, moondril hair

Bodice made of moon white bone

Luna and Juno nestled in bustier

She lashed at the two galloping, silver steeds

Rearing their heads, crazed eyes, manes wild as trauma

Foaming constellations from their bridles

They skid a scorch across my view, to a crystalline halt

Weaving forth a wave of space colour behind

Splashing great fans of painted lurid vibrancy

Crashing behind the vision above me

Like rough waves crashing against shore breaks

She: on awesome acid sprayed canvas

Above me, on my back.

Rhymes no longer mattered.  

Wide eyed, I looked up.

She drew death gilded leaves around me.

If you keep loading the gun, friend, you can’t keep blaming the bullets

This Greville and the Tombstones track could mean something different to everyone. What the stars might represent, what the rain actually is. Even the title is has deliberate purpose.

The track's symbolism certainly has a narrative for me, personally - a code, that I can relate to. My hope is that it can do similar for other readers. For that reason I like it and I think it is special, if a slight piece.

I hope you enjoy it.

This is:

If you keep loading the gun, friend, you can’t keep blaming the bullets

My eyes are hollowed out by a thousand sunsets

On a hundred wars

My eyes can see there are no stars in the night’s sky.

They have all been shot down over this cityscape.

Fallen lifeless on the ground.

Or strangled and thrown into pitch dark waters.  

So how come no one else notices?  

Young eyes, fresh eyes, clever eyes:

Don’t see what I see.  

You took my closed eyes and You opened them wide

To a hundred visions

I was not ever blind: the rain was blacker than night.

I saw What Haunts Me drown under the rainstorm.

Fallen lifeless on the ground.

And people talked to its glistening corpse, blind.  

So how come no one else notices?  

Is it not perfect now, how it is?

How you see things?

I see the black rain, lashing onto hard pavements

from a hundred eyes

I see sneers and the blind are blindly following on.

I see people kidding themselves they have not

fallen lifeless on the ground.

Eyes fixed on motion of others’ fragile balance.  

So how come no one else notices?

 

Perfection, eyes wide, lying here.

Seeing like I imagined.

Call me mad: a photograph by Jeanie Laub

I am delighted to share this photograph with adorers of the Band.

Artist, and friend, Jeanie Laub - someone I admire very much for her work which is often haunting and (something which captivates me) always projects an intense image of the thought processing behind the eyes in her subjects - photographed one of my works.

It is a beautiful photograph. It is one which captures aspects that resonate with me: not just about the words in it, but also of deeper aspects of my work as a whole. I feel very connected to it.

Image courtesy of Jeanie Laub, 2016

Please do seek out Jeanie's exhibitions whenever you are able.

Hymn für die Kirche der Krähen

My friend, the wonderful @tellthee has translated my Hymn For The Church of Crows into the better German. 
I hope people enjoy it as much as I do thinking of it being sung in gorgeous church spaces.

I wish you better

This a song that I needed to get out my system. And hopefully it is now out of it.

It's called...
I wish you better

I wish you better so I can miss you like homesickness

I wish you better so I cut myself

You are not better enough to deserve my scars

You are as a crisp November leaf in fire

I wish you better so I wander, broken

You are not better enough to deserve my fractures

You cast no light to cast no ill-light

I wish you better so I send flower heads

You are not better enough to deserve my mourn

You are far from risen from the dead

Christ Almighty, I wish you better.

An ode to feeling this way

This is a song about having an anxiety attack.

An ode to feeling this way

Come to me, squeeze me.

Place your hands on my hips and inflict pain on me.

Remind me, too, of the night scent of strawberry smoke.

I get it occasionally.

Drink with me, Lonely.

Don’t need a barmaid, or barman. Poison for my company.

Take my control, being and shape:

turn me an aberration when skewering me.

Fingers delicate over and under the spinal cord,

playing out something grotesquely.

And what is this wave, but helplessness

And what is this sensation, but a falling

And what is this place, but my own hell

Muscles twitch but don’t get to anywhere,

feel the air like beetle antennae.

Heart rattles its bars, brain throttles the jailer, captives

I’m taking down with me.

A vibration in wires of veins and arteries into paralysis,

detuned ethereality.

Soul a rag. Eye burned yolk. Magnesium teeth tighten.

I’m my own enemy.

Damned pain: pain of the joyful act with the absence of joy.

A repetition zombie.

And what is this wave, but encasement

And what is this sensation, but landing

And what is this place, but my own hell

No one can reach into me and release the screw and I want to sleep longer

When I used to stand in-between a graveyard and a library

For National Poetry Day, I've written a new piece.
I wrote it quickly and it was enjoyable to put down.
This is something more clearly autobiographical than a lot of the Greville and the Tombstones tracks. I might well return to this style again.

But don't panic. However stripped back, it still is Greville and the Tombstones and if it came with a tune, it would be played on by an accordion.

When I used to stand in-between a graveyard and a library:

I remember standing, recalling latest songs in my head

From Thursday TV shows,

Re-running action from 24bit games,

Freeze framing a girl I noticed in the library earlier,

when I held a book with a fuchsia cover.

Always in blank winter light, my breath would cloud in the thin shelter.

I stood with barely more than one thing to be.

In my shapeless, black fleece jacket, I’d kick Doc Martens' scuffs at the pavement.

Fingers blushed from the concrete air.

The weight of my hair drawn in a swoop over my right eye as I invented

fantastic proposals I would definitely turn down.

Others were creating beauty so I didn’t need to bother.

My shapeless, black fleece turned feathers.

I figured I would tend the graveyard in the harshest conditions,

knowing that others wouldn’t be able to make it on such days.

Though they would often want to.

My hair is white but not like how Moses’ hair is white

Peggy Shaw by Alfred Cheney Johnston

This is:
My hair is white but not like how Moses’ hair is white

I’ve always been fascinated by Moses’ hair:

Did it really turn white up on the mount.

From conversing with God, way up there?

I’m not sure it happened like this.

I’ve got white hair but I don’t count,

God’s number amongst my contact lists.

The Almighty took silence.

I got white hair waiting for the voice.

I don’t live in a deep forest, but I don’t care

Of angels who cannot see for the trees.

Conversing with burning bushes, they’re

Hollow acts setting fire to themselves.

I’ve got white hair but I don’t believe

In burnt angel shaped cinder memories.

My angels have combusted.

I got white hair from their settling ashes.

I’ve often wondered: Did Moses’ staff of prayer, 

Struck on the coast to set his people free,
Really split and part the deep Red Sea?

That conversing with waves to get over there

Wasn’t just part of the orbit naturally?

I’ve got white hair but separating a sea

Was not as hard as between you and me.

My lovers have drowned.

I got white hair from the salted air.

My gods silenced themselves.

My angels burned themselves.

My lovers drowned themselves.

And I got white hair.

But not like how Moses got white hair.

Every ticket is a loser

This is not an allegory. There are no hidden meanings. No riddles to be solved are here. Greville and the Tombstones are not enigmatic. We are not Travis. Sorry, I mean this one.

This is a song about going to any common and garden circus and seeing what is going on at the circus.

Apart from the part about the two-handed lady. That is definitely about someone.

Carnival Strippers (1976)

This is:
Every Ticket Is A Loser

In the rafters, the incandescent light

Of my lonely self. People’s lives on brighter screens

Far from the life I lead, the screams of skeletons

who are equals And some beyond thin.

Some really beyond my pale skin.

Want to know how it must feel,

To bare a smile like old paint peel.

No matter the times it turns over, it says the same.

Magic 8-Ball: ‘Ask me again’

So I head out to this circus of tents,

Under slumber sky, forwardly drawn to naked lights

Far from the life I lead,

 the delights of skeletons who are equals

And some beyond thin

Some really beyond my pale skin

And the ringmaster says:

Roll up! Roll Up! Every ticket is a loser.

Enter, Enter! It’s the only show in this town!

Only thing at all around!

See stripper carnival girls shake up and down!

And a fine-suited lawyer in make-up of a clown.

Visit Freaks n’ Geeks in their side-show home!

You can brush their teeth with a spider leg comb.

Watch the contortionist held in chains on high!

Suspend belief that self-made wings will really fly

And the ride operator says:

Roll up! Roll Up! Every ticket is a loser.

Hit the target with each throw: win a prize!

A fish in a bag of water.

Step right up to the Hall of Mirrored View!

Rows of unblinking eyeballs focus back on you

Hurry, board the glo-coloured Ghost Train!

Half-vapour regrets tied down on tracks prayin’

Sorry, the Tunnel of Love is out of bounds!

Closed until notice, that is, it can again be found

And the Fortune teller says:

Roll up! Roll Up! Every ticket is a loser.

Come close so you may know your future.

Feel my hot, wet breath.

Put the tin chip into the coin-slot cabinet!

Watch a mechanical man judder round in it.

Stand in awe at the belittlers and liars!

Witness audacious back bending on tight wires.

Walk in unease of a two-handed lady wonder!

One candy floss is another’s knife of a murderer.

And the candy floss is poisoned too, people eat it because it's sweetly vacuous.

Roll Up! Roll up! Join this circus!

My lonely self sees nothing is first what they seem

Far from the life I lead, this is a shriek

 of greased skeletons.

And some beyond thin.

Some really beyond my pale skin.