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.

The Church of Crows is welcoming

After the alt-goth came the Church of Crows. And it was good.

All are welcome in the congregation.

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.