The Biggest Lie

You was the giant killer
Big chief of the Zulus
You was a hard man
King of the Hoodoos
Your word was law
Your name was God
But you’re the biggest lie
That has ever been told
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Mute

I dreamed that they banned music and silence softly ate at our minds and infiltrated our hearts until we were made of nothing but emptiness. Our voices contained no lyricism, or colour. Our thoughts contained no conflict, or wonder. Even our faces gave up and died – their blank countenances conveyed neither happiness nor pain, their egoless expressions were one and the same. A world without music was a world without tears, a world without laughter. A world without music was like a play without actors.

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Image ‘Mute’ by Maya Kulenovic

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Brompton’s

Squeeze me a Brompton’s and blow my joint while I eat this bird. I have a hard on for the kind of high only a hard shot of junk provides. My old man got tarred for drinking this bug juice, but I don’t care about tar – it’s the feathers I object to. I’ll blow my own brains out before I let anyone turn me into a chicken.

Those cold-blooded bastards down at the lizard house have it in for dissenters who sup God’s own from the crystal cup. They incarcerate anyone who jacks up or spreads a little green on his lungs. Their war on drugs is a futile exercise in enforced conformity. The pressures of the market lead to standardisation and the ubiquity of mediocrity.

Prohibition only causes the criminality that keeps the law enforcers in business. Everyone is a would-be snitch. Everybody is an enforcer trying to gun us down in a hail of psychic bullets. Pour me another baby; I’ve come over all terminal. I need to cradle my consciousness in velvet gloves.

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Leave Me Be

My spring is wound
Way too tight
I’m on the fight or flight
The roaches beneath my skin 
Are threatening to do me in
I’ve reached a certain velocity
It’s an animal ferocity
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I can’t sit still
I think I’m ill
I pace the floor
Make for the door
But out or in
I’m stuck on a pin
I can’t get free
Just let me be
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I’m rotating left then right
There is no peace in sight
I’m spinning like a top
I don’t think I can stop
I’m struggling for breath
I might catch my death
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I can’t sit still
I think I’m ill
I pace the floor
Make for the door
But out or in
I’m stuck on a pin
I just can’t get free
So please let me be
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Fungaloid

Travel me
Unravel me
Baffle me
Turn me out

Fix me with a fungal crown

Pump it in
Pour it out
Rub it on
Inhale – exhale
Spark it up
Snuff it out
Skin it back
Tear it down

Anoint my head

With manna from heaven
Spike me upward
Drag me down
Ball my lightning
Take me under
Turn me on
Turn me around
Innovate
With my confusion
Make me whole
If not holy
Bake me outside
In the sun
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My Old Man

Meat and two veg
On a formica table
Jim Reeves and distant drums
Twenty Kensitas Club
An ashtray full of dog ends
India Pale Ale and glass of rum
Plastic teeth in a grimace
The smell of Brylcream
A splash of Old Spice
And a clout round the lug
Tailored suits immaculate
And cuban heeled boots
Off to see a man about a dog
He was hard as nails
My old man
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Paint Me Yellow

Sodium yellow
The colour of caffeine
Paints the street
And invades my room
My nights are long
Measured in solitude
The world is sleeping
But there’s no peace
For the wicked
And I am wicked
So turn me over
And paint me yellow
I have hours to wait
Before the dawn
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Noah

Noah built an ark

He was thinking of the future

I built myself a raft

I was thinking of myself

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Stranger

left to the mercy of the weather god
drenched in the rhythmic rain
a man – a foreigner perhaps
dark and curly – straight and bent
is lost in the open country
he carries the casts of his funeral face
and the relics of fallen saints
always a stranger – stranger than life
he quarries great stones of remembrance
once he was this – once he was that
now an alien in these parts
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The Electric Messiah

There have been many messiahs, but none ever touched the majesty or lunacy of The Electric Messiah. The Electric Messiah kicked in the doors of the temple and set fire to the money changers. He did that a lot; he was bi polar you see. On the positive side he was very generous, but on the negative side he was quick to anger. The people had not asked for an Electric Messiah, but you get the messiah you deserve.

In a world of conflict he was the supreme arbiter; smashing the unjust and delivering the pious with a beatific smile. His days in the wilderness had taught him that temptation was a blessing and to succumb was to conquer. His right hand held a flaming sword and his left the book of mercies. He could draw thunder bolts from the heavens and calm the seas with a whisper. His road to Damascus was filled with doubtful blind men – The Electric Messiah offered judgment, but not redemption.

I met him in rehab, which was compulsory for him after the great pharmacology scandal of 76 when he was convicted of turning communion wafers into methamphetamine and baptizing new converts with LSD. The papers compared him with Charles Manson, but Charley was never so gifted as The Electric Messiah. We got on like a ward on fire – he was good at starting fires. He told me of his early life as the son of an electrician from Glasgow and how his great potential as a conductor of electricity was first discovered.

At the age of six he was caught in a massive electrical storm and struck by lightning several times leaving great charred craters behind him. His mother said it was a miracle, his father said it was a question of conductivity. All through his formative years he was known as Lightning Rod, but it was only in his teens while experimenting with magical mushrooms did he realize his manifest destiny as The Electric Messiah.

Things were to go disastrously wrong for The Electric Messiah when his doctors doped him with omnopon, strapped him to a table and crucified him with electrical oscillations. The electroconvulsive therapy was meant to cure him of his addiction enabling delusions. Instead it triggered a massive explosion which destroyed the hospital and sent out an electromagnetic pulse that destroyed London’s communications apparatus causing a major catastrophe.

That was the end of The Electric Messiah, or so they said. However, many have reported seeing him whenever there is a great electrical storm and his words have lived on, though his body is apparently gone. His intolerance and his anger are evoked whenever the powerful seek to justify the use of force. His generosity and kindness are evoked whenever they seek to preach restraint. Yes, The Electric Messiah left his mark on the world – you can’t be a true messiah unless you do.

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Jonah

the wind tugs at memory
in indistinct murmurs
from the wilder country
full of forbidden places
and ancient curses
I learned what it feels like
to become a beast
my face is fluid now
it can take many forms
angels and demons
dance across my surfaces
twinkling like children
in orphanage rags 

I took to the streets

to deliver the bad news

but the streets were so wide 

they swallowed me whole

Spotlight

When the spotlight hit us we were frozen in helpless fascination. We’d stayed longer than we meant to and just wanted to go home. From my point of view – and presumably hers – it was all over. Even the wildest of adventures becomes mundane with familiarity and it’s true what they say – familiarity breeds contempt. In the cold glare I could see that it was over; I felt no more remorse than I would for stepping on a roach and I viewed the whole thing with the same detachment. Whatever we had together had long outlived its usefulness.

Our thing was nourished by lies – from the start to the finish we never knew each other. Fear drew us together; the fear of loneliness, the fear of discovery. That’s the history of the world – boy meets girl, boy lies to girl and gravity does the rest.

They say nothing lasts forever, but some things last a lifetime; like fear, anguish and shame. Ever since the Garden of Eden we have been covering our shame with little white lies. When the black dog begs at my table and the cold wind hampers my doors I review my liturgy of falsehoods with a wry smile. Every lie begets another – each a building block in an empire of self deception.