Ghosts are real

This is... Ghosts are real

Dead relationships are dead.
Ghosts are real.
Haunting the old haunts.
Some people contact them.
I don't believe in them.
Ghosts are real.
Dead relationships are dead. 
They float silently by my eye.
They never age, but rot.
Ghosts are real.
Dead relationships are dead.
I hear the shrieks.
I hear the sound trees make.
Ghosts are real.
Dead relationships are dead. 
I think I must be dreaming.
I hear them in my bed.
Ghosts are real.
Dead relationships are dead.

There's another ten verses I could tell, but everything I've said covers it just as well.

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.

S-booky decorations

Composition and photo by @tellthee

Wishing everyone a very spooky Halloween.

Terminal agitation

I wrote this fast in a bath. Greville and the Tombstones appear to take the most melodramatic baths.

This is:
Terminal agitation

I cling to the side of the pool.

My naked body in supine pose of the tormented Jesus.

Knuckles grooved rivets.

A fleshy sac: loose yolk exposed.

My modesty slapped in oil.  

I consider dying.  

It's been two summers.

It’s been so much longer now.  

I wanted ovations.

Men punching the air.

Women falling into arms.

To be beautiful forever.

I wanted certification of life.  

I consider dying.  

I’ll not find ways back.

I’m alright with how I am now.  

Blood lacerated in the dance.

My hair, slippery and lank from the steaming pool.

Hanging willow branches.

Creating little concentric ripples.

Vulnerability coiling fingers.

I consider the pain.

A hymn for a nihilist

This was an interesting piece. I tweeted a couple of early drafts as I worked on it. Then it disappeared, deep into the well. Now it has resurfaced, the stones out its pockets. It is much changed. It went in a therapy and came out a hymn.

This is: A hymn for a nihilist

Wipe clean your eyeball on a sleeve,

This is not a benediction for your strife.

Pick up this note of mourning on cold days.

Days when skies are nicotine yellow lit life.

You could be happier, I’d say.  

What claims victory in war,

when you’re only fighting yourself?

What case are you trying to prove,

when you prosecute your own defence?

You want to watch some drown,

but to do it you must wade deeper in.

Don’t pierce that voodoo doll of yours,

you’ll only prick a finger with the pin.  

Young romantics, youthful dead.

Though who can truly tell the difference?

The trophy on an arm and another

skeleton cluttering the cupboard.

Rattling bones hush the screams.

Out of car windows, Time discards you

like empty tins, rattling on the road.

Seeing the car get small, you’re cut free.  

Velvet, burst stuffed heart cushion.

Dead fragile, vein thin leaf smoked pew.

Wallpaper peeling from humid stress,

Everything needs a redecoration.

Every bit moulders in ruins.

It’s complicated and it’s ridiculous

how decomposition is natural.

Come to terms with whatever the point is.

The perished, holly berry mildew,

worn out as a coat that really suits you.  

Years poured in, paper thin.

All the people are junkyards,

corrugated dolphin companions in the surf.

Wipe clean your other eyeball on a sleeve,

See through your ghosts giving up.

Wring out the excruciating tone.

View terror under grief within.

Creep towards The Word like medication,

Take it anytime, whatever dose,

It won’t cure your mortal bone.  

God, how did you get so old?

Trauma keeps from feeling the years.

Stolen act of misguided kindness.

I sense works growing cold in my warm core.

Watching tornadoes touch down on the ocean floor

make it worthwhile to endure.

Is this good therapy? I’m really, very, not so sure.

There is no Live album

There is no band. There is no Live.

Many thanks to my friend @tellthee for this great image and design.

It's so realistic. But it is not a real album. Like all Greville and The Tombstones albums, if they did exist, they would be blank. Not even any grooves in the vinyl, I would think.

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.

Night of the encroaching thoughts

I've been listening to a lot of electronic beats lately. This is the result.

Faith Bacon

Night of the encroaching thoughts:

Mechanised dust enters by window crack, 
Leaving trails of sawdust self back
In circular tracks
on the sill.
I think: This must be Lucifer!
 I curse.
It flips on its back:
wings pasted down
Weak dust legs cycling upwards
growing stiller
and still. 
Dust is dust.

Smokers with their ointments for pains.

Rubbed fastidiously into veins.

Flowers, bushes and earth

Scent the humid, coarse air.

Reminiscent of a hospital.

And, of course,

this

persistent rain. 

I must remember to take a second breath.

I’ve hidden too long in death.

Clung to it like a balloon,

won at a fare

by a lover,

tin rifle

and
dead dog stare

Move Heaven and Earth for connections.

I mistrust how

Angels sow seeds to grow affections.

I can’t see why

They’re

not

considered demons.  

Flesh beats as wanting, death is a bone.

Existing is lonely, dying is alone.

I’m hanging out in the water tank trick,

denying help.

And I’m painted out as the lunatic.

On the fringes

Of a social circle
I can’t get out of.

Playing with rotting corpses of people I once knew, behind.

Day-freak phantasies in period costume read rehearsed lines

I re-animate in my mind,
wasted embodiment, weak limbs hardly attached.
Dust is dust.

I must remember they’re

All longing acted out
by loathing heart.

I must remember to take a second breath.  

I find five million ways to get over you.

Then given five million and two,

To leave you dangling tie high over

Suffering pit

Sky scores thunder, darkens azure

I cast forsaken

Shadow

with pitchfork

and

arrow tail tip.  

I must remember to take a second breath.

For these memories so final

That they live in death spirals of narrative, which weaves

Intricate tooled fragility into individual grieves.

Each little melancholic cog fastened to me.

A tree

Weighed with rusted scent leaves

In the autumn

heavy dew,

I draw up my fatal position.

My time passes, oh it passes.

The grieves glisten, oh they glisten

in the narrowing light

dejected I see

my
cracked

human condition.

Einmal wird das sich das Licht sich nicht länger dir zuwenden um dich zu treffen

@tellthee has interpreted the Greville and the Tombstones track, One day the light will no longer turn to meet you.

@tellthee told me her translated works are more than just English to German: they are expressions sewn as a quilt of feelings, sounds and imaginations of her reading the original. That, to me, is beautiful.

I am very grateful and love to share them.

This is: Einmal wird das sich das Licht sich nicht länger dir zuwenden um dich zu treffen

One day the light will no longer turn to meet you

I don't think this really is about a lighthouse, y'know. I'm not even totally sure the lighthouse keeper is even employed as one.


One day the light will no longer turn to meet you

Drowned books.

Dashed on broken bones,

Split out at weird angles.

Corpse shallows.

Heaving in seaweed swell.

The Sadness took them.

Can’t you tell?  

The sky is falling in, isn’t it.

Someone should check outside.
Where's light?

The lighthouse keeper says:

"One day this turns away from you"

"One day you will be left in the dark" 

Wound tracks.

Silver laid ice spines.

Over laid down sleepers.

Paper cliffs.

Words rubble down below.

Fell off trembling hand.

Spider ink vibrato.  

A happy pose for a photograph.

Smiles keep only on the film roll.
  No blinking.

The lighthouse keeper says:

"One day this turns away from you" 

"One day this shines on you" 

"One day this leaves you in the dark" 

"The smile will snap closed. 

The sky will fall in.

The lid will snap closed

The earth will fall in" 

The lighthouse keeper says: 

"The lighthouse shows us pulsing as what we are"

"One day the light will believe you"

"One day the light will leave you"

"One day the light will no longer turn to meet you"

"One day you will be in the dark"

Light blinks across books,

Corpses, travels and paper cliffs,
Collapsed skies.

The lighthouse keeper says:

"I am getting older, and I am in pain"

"I will one day go and leave you"

"You’ll think the sky is falling in.

You’ll have to go outside to check" 

"Go outside and check"

"The sky is where it has always been"

CODA

Everyone ends.

Hasn't a chance.

Still, you are the sunrise in me.

A Tempest breeze.
Rough ground in a church yard.
Detached trusted light.

Betrayed song of a strained life.

You are the stone sunrise which gets me up.