#miodes

Meanwhile I’ve been doing some more holiday knitting. These are two adventures in intarsia - cushion covers for a friend’s 50th. Again I’m using up and improvising with odds and ends of mohair. Kids back at school tomorrow and I’ll be back making music! Hope you had a great summer!

Butt Ends

Alcohol is my mother

I look for her

In the dregs of unfinished beer cans

And – if I get lucky-

A bottle or two

I wander the streets

And the streets are my home

My father is cigarettes

I don’t get any to smoke

But the butt-ends that other people throw away

I wander the streets

Looking for my mum and dad

The clothes I wear

Were presented to me

By the lid of a dustbin

My mother is alcohol

My dad is cigarettes

I am dressed by the bins

Some people live

And some people watch

I watch

Wandering through the fairground

Sometimes I feel

I have lived a thousand years

And each one

Too well remembered

I stand by the A P O C A L Y P S E

See the terror-pleasure

Unleash from people’s faces as they

Flash before my eyes in turn

How each ride brims with metaphor

Like the Caterpillar hoarding

Your riding on the tail at the start

But it’s got you in its teeth at the end

And on the merry-go-round

I glimpse my reflection

In the mirrored axis

Chasing myself spinning round

And an old man 

Plays the music

And counts the money coming in

Some spend a fortune having their fortune read

But I already knew my fate

I saw my destiny on the carousel

Riding alone

Circling furiously

 Into the night

A discarded pamphlet read

THE REVOLUTION STARTS HERE

And a thousand fliers of a famous face

Lay scattered on the ground -

To be known 

Is to be tossed and trodden on

Black treacle sleep

I sink every night

Into molasses

Heavy but sweet

And nothing is recalled

The shapes engulfed

In pitch black lava flow

I sink into its folds

The hollow eyes

The torn jowls

The murderess hands

Drowning in molasses

I wake up

Like another 1000 lives

Have been lived through

All Immersed

In black treacle dreams

The darkness forgets but

The sweetness remains

Sub bass loops

Felt not heard

Insistent echoing

Driving in

Burrowing into the membrane

Pitch bent and modulated

A mimicking almost

Impossible to distinguish

From the voice we think with

In our heads

Chorus peddle multiplying

Direction panning

From here, from there

Looking over the shoulder

Simply tools of a sound engineer

A single voice

Carried so long and so far

But by such means

I know these machinations

Seen them working

Distorting the will

And the understanding

Of those about me

So tired out

Trying to push through

A swamp of fuzzy reverb

Drawn into the same entanglements

The same clutter

Again and again and again

Trying to free themselves

Trying to free the self

From the constant noise