Bright blue somewhere

So I was caught up in the moment, a memory, a glimpse into the workings of the mind. The lazy mind that, as far as we see fails to retain so much. Of course that's not true , we are all cameras, we load up a mega pixel record the world that goes deep into the library. It's the playback that is the problem, that and locating the images. The grey, ever bumbling information that becomes cross wired and tired out and too lazy to recount itself in any comprehensible way. The mind leaves us with jumbles and tasters, distortions and non-default versions prone to decay and exaggeration, wildly sometimes.

My version of my world and my experiences is crazily unreliable, untrustworthy, stared at through a milk bottle bottom and then scrapped in the dirt, but it is all I have. The good news is I can beef up the pleasant and dull and discolour the nasty. All by myself I can rewrite that tiny pin prick of human history I inhabit and dance, every forgetful on the head of the pin that caused the pin hole I walk across. Here am I, whoever I am, whoever you were, wherever that was. You'll have to take my word for it though.

How good it was

Front cover.

Back cover

I'd forgotten how good this album is, the first I ever bought. Hard to imagine that I was listening to this whilst my parents watched the Black and White Minstrels on the BBC. Things have changed.

Blue bird of happiness

Then there was the day, that special day, one in which everything rhymed. I looked out of the window and I saw a blue bird. It was just as you had said it would be but not to me. Between the grasses and branches, between the sky and earth, dancing on an easy wing. Gripping the finest perch, letting go in a millisecond then alighting, so gently. An unfamiliar sun was moving around a foreign sky, all to a pattern and formula, the very correct details that somebody else had worked out. I watched it for what seemed like hours but the study was over in minutes, perhaps less, all played out in elastic time. The image however has stayed in my mind, like a tattoo or some beautiful ordeal or torture I can never quite forget. That deep and lazy blue, the divine colours blending in form and feathers and a tiny, pounding heartbeat, there inside. Heartbeat, wingbeat, strange pulses and the lightness of the golden moment.

It was also on that same day, I saw you, the far side of the quadrangle, walking away, looking back, then moving on. You had your own choices of colour, chosen and worn and on display. You didn’t quite see the blue bird, you were elsewhere, in thought, meeting yourself headed in another direction, perhaps. My thoughts stopped and then raged and then engaged and formed up in a time stamp. A black and blue mark that was never to heal. How careless of this fragile mind of mine, the only one I shall ever know, to see and hear these things so briefly, for such a small amount of time, only then to blindly and so easily let them go.

A certain sense

A certain sense of not quite belonging, not home not away,

A part and piece, an entity but incomplete,

A certain sense, a vague feeling,

Stuck on the edge, struck out,

Without quite knowing what it's all about,

Because nobody really knows,

Nobody really knows anything.

Do they?

Madonna McGowan

Madonna McGowan

Madonna McGowan

Gone up to the town

Her nails are bright purple

Her thoughts go in circles

Her temperament brittle

She might scream, she might spittle

Name has nothing in the middle

Like a Polo mint

She spent time in a hospital

Some institution or special school

She mixed with offenders

She offended the mixers

Nail varnish remover her elixir

Of choice and necessity

She read your tattoo

You read her ones too

All crimes, mean, nasty, petty

But she's forming a plan

Looking out for a man

To nail varnish the town

Madonna McGowan

Her of the daisies, in town.

Dali

Salvidor Dali

Sneakin' down the alley

Heading for the ballet

In the Auditorium

Hieronymus Bosch

Under the cosh

Never at a loss

In the Planetarium:

There are many artists out there, most are not quite parasites

Many deserve their human rights

More so than others might allow, for art is such a sacred cow,

To the educated, emancipated masses,

Who want it done away with,

Daily Mail style, while all the while just

Moan about the licence fee

So we give it away, for free.

Paul McCartney's Lamborghini

On the street or on the TV

On the beach in her bikini

Like a woman likes the meaning

All the boys are heavy breathing.

In the pages, on the screen

Everywhere you've ever been

Tyre marks black across the road

All the places that you want to go.

Wire wheels and shiny machinery

Paul McCartney's Lamborghini.

Couch v Sofa

"Great, that stuck up bitch won't ever notice a twenty missing from her handbag, nor that mascara either."

"This is fecking useless, a horrible tinny sound that won't impress Simon or the other judges."

"Ok, I'm fed up with you SKY, so maybe I can't recall my PIN number, you lot must have it on file somewhere, I'm payin' £40 a month for this."

Not a couch but a sofa, a return to the settee: Doe eyed and supremely satisfied with their lot in life they sprawl barefoot in carefree ecstasy never worried about the interest free bow-wave that crashes before them. Sofa women enjoy the warmth and comfort of having nothing to worry about or be responsible for as they relax into sofa induced trances in their perfect staged lounges across the world of advertisements. There are no spills, crumbs or pet hairs here in the sofa dimension. Couches are king, places to dream dreams, stroke cheap guitars, rummage in a neighbours handbag while she makes the coffee, talk to the sofa help line on the phone – it's all like a perfect world stuck in 1955 (which we all know happened to be the perfect year) and nothing needs be paid for until after the divorce is finalised.

Terrorist's blues

whatever's done is done

lost to change, out stare the sun

embrace the blindness yet to come

safe in some knowledge, ripped and torn

that those in power couldn't care less

for the truth, honesty or openness

so you just hurt and take another hit

with no way of expressing it

the poor, the foolish and the brave

watch the concrete poured on every grave

recall the faces but the names are gone

step into shadows everyone

clear as blood, too thin to run

whatever's done's already done

whatever's done is done

Radiation rose

In Bank of Scotland blue, in radiation red

In General Motors blue , in radiation gold

In Levi Straus blue, in radiation glow

In Barclays Bank blue, in radiation rose.

Somewhere

We were left to look for our own forms of wisdom, to find it where we could, to seek it out, to nurture it and so make it clear and believable. We had the dream that we would be understood and that, ultimately understanding would prevail and we would prosper as we passed through. As a young man I took that road, not realising where it would ultimately lead nor did I appreciate the ardour of the journey or the full depth of the disappointment that I would feel as I neared it’s end. To travel so far for so long but never arriving was not something I was prepared for. I had comforted myself with the knowledge that friends walked with me, we were a troop, a cabal, a team searching but one by one they strayed or fell away until I too finally was lost and all but consumed. The road’s end now beckons, neither a cliff edge nor a dark cave, not a blinding light or a peaceful refuge, floating on some serene ocean many miles deep. No, there will be none of that, that is not my fate for I see now I never had a destination nor a direction, I followed and illusion and is into an illusion that I have travelled. There is no way back. Somewhere in the distance I hear a cat’s meow.

(Some scholars, such as Michael V. Fox, have suggested that Ecclesiastes is influenced by philosophies like Stoicism and Epicureanism. “The boldest, most radical notion in the book is...the belief that the individual can and should proceed toward truth by means of his own powers of perception and reasoning; and that he can in this way discover truths previously unknown…This is the approach of philosophy, and its appearance Ecclesiastes probably reflects a Jewish awareness of this type of thinking among foreign intellectuals…He does not look to revelation or tradition for guidance. He believes that he can discover what is good to do in life by acquiring wisdom and using it to examine and contemplate the world. This is the stance of Greek philosophy…Koheleth’s focus on individual experience, in particular the perception of pleasure, bears a significant resemblance to Hellenistic popular philosophy, whose central purpose was to find the way to individual happiness by the use of the powers of reason. The Epicureans sought happiness through pleasure and freedom from fear. The Stoics thought to find it in the shedding of desires and passions…In 1:4-7 Koheleth mentions that the four elements compromise the totality of the physical word – a notion common to Greek philosophers especially Stoics…These general similarities…support the hypothesis that the author was aware of some concerns and attitudes of philosophical thinking current in the Hellenistic age.")

Sphere

This sphere believes we’re doing well

This sphere considers there’s no hell

This sphere knows life in every cell

This sphere believes we’re doing well

Jewels

Sleeping in tiny jewels

Across the place where the universe was

A hand was reaching, fingers crosses

We watched with awe but felt no fear

For love’s sweet shelter is always near

Always near, always near,

Some where close around about here

In the corner where wisdom rules

Sleeping in those tiny jewels

Sleeping in those tiny jewels

Under the red sun in a rusty sky

We point to crosses and cross over bye and bye

We stretch the boundary you and I

It’s not enough to say you tried.

It’s not enough to say you died

Nothing is ever enough.

So the longest story goes

We walked across the oldest stones

Steady as thunder and sand blast

Where ever the five winds blew us

We held our breath to address the past

In the corner where wisdom rules

Sleeping in those tiny jewels

Sleeping in those tiny jewels

Bathsheba

Bathsheba had a lover

She loved him eye to eye

She fed him bread and hogs head pie

And they danced on through the night

Bathsheba made a promise

Before the moon and sun

With trickled blood she praised the Lord

But the damage had been done

Bathsheba stole the answer

She took it to her heart

There’s slim and thin who don’t get in

The church is torn apart

Bathsheba had a lover

The lover slept all night

She called the Lord but he ignored

"Why does he stay so quiet?"

"Why does he stay so quiet?"

"Why does the Lord stay quiet?"

She called the Lord but he ignored

"Why does he stay so quiet?"

Bathsheba’s gone to Heaven

Or so the good book said

Bathsheba’s name is still alive

But the lover is long dead

The lover is long dead