An overly worded allegory about how the sun will rise after a death

In ways this is the reflection of Life Flashes into Rolling Death - A something that offers hope after it. It's my most hopeful work yet.

It is a little wordy though. This is my effort at a stream of consciousness like Michael Stipe.



This is about the great cosmic truth.

Irina Ionesco - Sylvia Kristel, ca. 1980

This is:
An overly worded allegory about how the sun will rise after a death

Like a log from the woodpile,

I take a day and toss it onto the fire.

It jags itself into the melee, gripping fast so that it makes a dull knock.

A chuff into the white ash remains and the dying warmth is shocked alive.

The log draws back its jagged, cracked lips, hissing a sneer from within the consummation.

“You can burn truths from me only once”

….

Peppermint green lichen sprigs along the log curl with flecks of gold

cutting from thermals.

Tiny fires spiral upwards and zip out of existence hither and thither.
Rings softly blacken in the lazy heat and I wonder at the catch.

….

The catch latches as it studies the form

and flames appear as if summoned from the loose veil.

The bark bends in a stretch of cracking ecstasy.
Glorious and painful sounds:
A firecracker whipped – once, twice – three times quick!
Short puffs of smoke.
Like a cornered man who paid for the bullets getting his shots fired off.
A hazy, stinging, spice science scent mixed with mellow nature entwine in the air.
They catch my breath and sting terrible water from my eyes.
….
There is fizz from the rings, a dry boiling.
Flames emerge through the log.
They shiver as springing new-borns and quickly find their confidence
blooming into thin petals, with roots, feeding on the log.
Flimsy threads, with the precision of a surgeon and the intent of a back alley ripper
....
The flame incants:
drumming and throwing quick dash shapes almost recognisable in glow.
Firelight splashes uneven surfaces in strokes and smears of rich oranges and warning reds.
Arteries form on the char wood.
Lava lines pulse through the block.
It is being used up by the hot death in a cauldron of lurid stroke marks.
….
Low now. Low.
The pastel fire cares little for the log now they are well acquainted.
Ammonia pink and eggshell blue at the heart base of the hearth.
A molten, swirling pearl from the Indian Sea.
Flames:
languid and calm from a veteran heat, settle on the log.
A darkness is in fire, a flame is not all bright – a black root fuels the deepest leaf.
….
Dark, darker still the day:
the black oil blues of a crow’s feather.
The work of a deep violence, captivating and purifying in the deathly swallow.
It spits and spritz final curses from between those jagged, singed lips.
….
The morbs drape over me like a heavy woollen rug wrapping tight round me.
My soul:
still warmed from the primordial fire – the log – now fully black of soot in the hearth.
Heat has melted this weighed monochrome rug of morose into round, dark droplets.
Then I watch as they too melt, to be absorbed and to scuttle about my grey being.
Touch:
the searing lancing truth of philosophy.
A thousand pin pricks.
Shadows:
bird wings forcing dead air down upon me.
A thousand flapping wings.
This melancholic fever, a gloom of urgency on my time, will not break.
For how long this mistress of my soul wants to keep me for her bidding,
I do not know.
I toss another log onto the fire.
….
Then first tentative light of a new day again.
It takes only a little point on the circumference of the turning,
burning sun for it to fill the room.
Waves hit the drawn thin yellow drapes, blushes into a diffuse, innocent yellow.
It fills this empty box, like I am living through the surface of light itself
I sit cross-legged in front of them like a screen projecting pure unshaped wonder at me.

Lebensrückblenden in den heranrollenden Tod, Von Greville Tombs

I am very honoured and privileged whenever the Greville and the Tombstones' works are reinterpreted.

I am very lucky to have a friend in @tellthee who I deeply appreciate of her great efforts in transforming her very favourite words from the band into her native German language. Unlike songs with musical constraint, Greville and the Tombstones has no music so can be rendered beautifully into German which never fail to leave me awed in their new sound.

Here is:
Lebensrückblenden in den heranrollenden Tod, Von Greville Tombs
(translation from Life flashes into rolling death)

Life flashes into rolling death

This is Pancake Tuesday. Greville and the Tombstones doesn't do Pancake Tuesday. This is a new track.

Inspired by the idea of Britpop - that attempt to create a way to transmit a feeling from matter-of-fact life for others to associate. Added to this is a slight stream of conscious method to provide an element of the "woozy". Finally put through the alt-gothic filter of Greville and the Tombstones.

The success of it is perhaps as intermittent as a radio receiving a broadcast from another era during a storm.

This is.... Life flashes into rolling death

Rich lit ‘noons would stretch out like stick chewing gum.

Tempers calm as the pond.

Life had scented skin of verve and was effortless in sinew.

As you were.

Remember before the church roof burned down?

Me neither.

And they nailed up a cross using burnt beams.

Dune bugs longed for carefree acoustic coffee hang outs.

Experiments found bounds.

Threat of bad weather was no threat at all to the hip kids.

As you were.

Remember our gravest deep and meaningful?

Me neither.

You arrived out of Texas looking like you'd just had sex.

Bitter spiced smoke of wood fires along quiet streets.

Streets we knew the kerbs.

Laid paths by stories make for far stranger encounters.

As you were.

Remember they found the body in the city reservoir?

Me neither.

The company said tap water was probably safe to drink.

Occasional cars slowed, allowing bees to weave safely.

Nature took its course.

Baritone sprung grandfather clocks caught sun slithers.

As you were.

Remember when storm wind couldn’t blow us over?

Me neither.

And now the black swinging gate is all I can hear.

Throw away lines floated out in a scrap paper gloom

Felt the eye of lost twilight

And you really liked me. Velvet soft, red lipped sunset.

As you were.

Life, equally with purpose and for no reason.

We would lie back wasting, just to listen to death rolling.

We thought there must be a universal truth,

Because no one stayed long enough to witness everything fade

and wash off.

Cantatas cracked lines in the bone china, contents seeping.

Surface tinged pink.

Tree roots cracked the surface, amber words poured to be held.

As you were.

Remember how often we’d offer our goodbyes?

Me neither.

You wrote down: “I’m a bit of a dick, but who isn’t?”

in indelible ink.

There was a stone set by the garden, I never had seen it.

There’s many deaths to die.

I saw you laid in a lining of white silk, you looked all to be as you were.

Remember what happens to us afterwards?

Me neither.

Although I’ve got all points of reference to hand.

I blink. Sometimes I do remember what it maybe was like.

Patched imaginings recollected.

Remember flashing smiles and saying things were OK and mean it?

As you were.

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.