Lyrics

Meditations in the Longest Morning

If I could only stay unseen as if I were a ceiling. My shell is broken now, like gutters eroded by acid rainwater. Burning a moon on a bed-sheet, heaven is sharp with flickering stars.
It is the same patterns keeping a momentum, pumped in afraid and snow-thirsty. We have been doing this mirage or magpie store or measures upon measures or medicine for a while now, it has become blunt-toothed, spurious, darker. I hear bells, and attacks and frays. I have tried make-believe, telling arguably horrible lies. I can spare static and its landmine explosions, though they provide amputation of the most trouble. There, the closed window. Here, the wind. Transparent, haphazardly tenuous.
I am not right. No. I am a pile of bridges, dislocated a few inches too far away to touch. I do not think I want to feel connected, not to this world if it makes me shudder like this without any warning. When it won’t even show me it’s face, that monster. I don’t want to be stitched into the armour and chain-mail and bones. I have the only one I need here, his eyes fold around my unfounded sunbeams.
The engines get enough nowhere as it is and even they continue to poison. Do they know what they're flitting ? I've got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shoulder and my unformed radios. I'll be back, I'll lose, gap-toothed, from the valley; you don't want me to go where you go, so I go where you don't want me to. It's only afternoon, there's a lot ahead. There won't be any strawberries. I distance on the screen and the stairwell turns.

T.S. Eliot Mirrored initially

A poem intentionally written to mirror T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock', but it didn't precisely achieve what I'd hoped, yet something else appeared:

We'll stay at home, together but alone
but for the mornings that crumple on the floor,
like waste paper printing headlines on the ceiling.
We'll stay behind the door, afraid to wander
in uncertainty, parallel to busy roads,
the voiceless excursions,
the plans for long soporific days in expensive homes
and fresh-aired kitchens filled with frying pans.
Without direction, the answers all lie behind.
Ask me the question; I'll try and make up my mind.

Elsewhere the city men all crowd together,
either not talking or talking about the weather.

The clarity in eyes that bless the walls,
The understanding in a dull gaze on the walls,
sprawling time packed up into a box or a fist,
hurrying on tiptoes everywhere the sunlight falls,
tripped up in the garden, an inevitable descent,
and oblivious to the clock-face, the crimson crepuscule,
disappeared again into the rushes. No one knows where it went.

But it doesn't matter what's been done.
The eyes, still and still clear, don't recognise time passed,
don't realise what they may have missed.
It will end in the same place that it had begun,
nerves tight around the second try as tight as the last,
no space for thoughts of new starts or possible debris,
not one thought for broken hearts, for the people we cannot be.
We'll share this absent-mindedness, between
the clutter of conviction and certainty,
and practicality and potentiality,
and other matters on which we can agree

Elsewhere the city men, all crowded together,
are not talking, or talking about the weather.

And if we are going to fall apart, then we will do.
Our facades will fracture, our fallen faces,
our lost grip on graces, our black and our blue, our lost places
in the queue. We create words for the fears we cannot name.
And although our landscape erodes with the years,
the cage is the same. The scenery is new,
but what we call history will happen again,
so how can there be anyone but ourselves to blame?
Break and build, create and burn,
the pride follows the fall when pride has taken its turn.

What's in a gaze?

But when they spoke, their eyes couldn’t come together.
You never know who is looking at you in the dark.

For how long can I continue to watch the tips of my shoes,
and the floor beneath them, and worry wordlessly about home?

It’s all peachy, really, it’s Video Killed the Radio Star.
Then again, it’s an unlit candle, an unmarked calendar,
or Ginsberg burning dollar bills in a bin, grinning behind
a grisly beard, or a man you only know vaguely from some talk
of a reality TV show becoming America’s next President.

People are incapable of concealing their latent resentments
When they are looking at something else, but at you?
What’s in a gaze anyway? What are you looking at, for whom?

If there was somebody, they have left already. Prior appointments
available only to high flyers, PowerPoint presenters, success stories.
Not available to you. You who are so aware that in a single minute
everything could be different. You who says goodbye but
never knowing how to leave. These moments are split, a smile
Splitting open a face that once scared you. See? See how different it is?

It’s different to be seen by different people, but are you ever seen?
If you are, you really shouldn’t be. Not on any road, in any doorway,
at any bus stop. But you have to get there somehow.

There are good people everywhere, doing terrible things,
and if I’m not going to be one of the good people, I don’t mind so much
being a terrible thing. If it means I’ll be looked for, used,
needed for whatever, even if I know that needs are fulfilled
and the things you think you need are usually what you want, actually,
or what you want to need. But probably the last thing you really need.

You really need to get that appointment. It isn’t enough
to put out the fires. Damage control- how sad, if it’s what you do best.
What you really do best is what other people tell you that you do best.

It doesn’t alter the experience, even one moment’s fragment of it,
if you know from the start how it’s going to end.

The thing that never happened

They never spoke about it but it happened, and thoughts
of what happened pushed into the soil only grew heavier and dirtier
when they pretended to strip the past of its indelible importance
and pretended that their early nights were the product
of productive days and not prescriptions, but they never had dreams
and they never took flight and they never felt the rush of wind
on their faces and their faces did not even feel theirs.
They stilled in their silence until silence sounded like a soundtrack.
If they had thought about it, they might have seen the faintest promise
of closure, enough to try for, enough to cry for. Cold and concrete
and the cure perhaps as painful as the poison itself but to come to a close
nonetheless. Instead they chose to tell themselves no closure was needed
for no wounds had been left open for nothing had wounded them,
and saw this as stoicism, as strength but it was strength mistaken,
in actuality it was slavery, and the bad guys got away,
and the robbers got rich, and what went around never would come back around
with some comeuppance. Their paths redirected, their plans and aspirations
and passions scribbled beneath a blanket of white noise they thought
was safety. They never again would take off their shoes to dance
or light candles in the summer or make someone's day by offering a smile
or offer anything much at all. Why would they, when they got nothing back?
A tombstone in every doorway, a bitterness in every bite,
a listlessness in every kiss and in that listless life, one big lie-
I am whole, I can be what I want to be because this never happened to me.
They throw their heads back and then they laugh. They watch Forrest Gump
with dry faces. They sometimes have nightmares like those of children,
of crocodiles and claws under the bed. When they wake, that means it's a new day
and that means nothing now. Tell me you know I exist, says the smallest voice,
a whisper, an echo, from somewhere buried so immeasurably deep under stones,
a voice that had been stoned to death. Tell me you'll save me, that
you'll pull me out of here, that you will give me a chance to survive,
I'm all bloodied up and broken but because of that I'm stronger now.
I know the meaning of strong, and I know that it all means something.
If they ever catch a breath of that small voice, they turn up the radio,
take another pill and swallow, change the channel to a game show,
check their phones and when the curtains are drawn, throw more stones.