Newsagents

All the salutations
Of an arabian horse
When he meets a nomad
Of the magazine course
Slipping in and out
Its so sad
Pop goes the weasel again

Furthermore the sycophants
Are creeping up to heaven's door
Lord knows I tried to stop them
Before the shit hit the fan
And every so often
I shot them
With a gun shaped like a man

Because speaking of what I am
I need a bullet head
My razor brain
Is blunted by all
The hard things she's said

Shoot me into Eden
Nothing's perfect but the dead
And they stay that way forever
Inspite of the Vulture's being fed

And I had a close shave
The type they give privet hedge
But nothing's sacred, nor private these days
You have to find your own window ledge

The birds in the steeple
The people are all making jam
And a hundred hungry wasps are swarming
Wanting to eat every last gram

Of Life and Death

I've seen you in the corner store
Next to the margarine
You were reciting Nietzsche's words
And the supreme human being
However the universal soldier
At the check out
Dropped his genes
Into the checkout girl's draw
And told her she was
Out of this scene
The director walked in all upperty
And wanted to settle a score
The producer had fallen in with the wrong sort
Of onions
And was known as 'cucumber obscene'
He said I'm not having this sort of carry on
In my show
You can go now,
But don't forget the blow
You owe me
Out back behind the bins
But he left under shadows of booms
Through the emergency exit
Behind a stack of magazines

Some time later the director
Was sitting in his chair
Interviewing a new actor
For the role of Fred Astair
So you say you can dance?
Well show me
Bring out the fast hearts
Lay your cards on the table
And the actor turned aces of faces
In his eyes
Black clubs made his boots
Diamonds stolen from skies
Sparkled over the spades of his shoes
And she knew
He had played his cards right

The next night
She was out there waiting for him
Ginger Rogers
In her costume
Of flowers in bloom
And colours like shrapnel
Splayed across the room
When she lifted her skirt hem
And swished like a balloon
All head and shoulder
and traction knee
All break a leg at the universal sodiers
Waiting in the quay
All sailors must love her space jamboree
And suck at their lamposts
Where she sings in the rain

It wasn't for love of money
That he stayed
You see the job was a good one
His days were arranged
And every brick of time numbered
Like in pyramids of the pharaohs
Egyptian mummies loved
To see their Cleopatre
And fathers and mothers all become
Strange when you think you don't
Their ancient histories
Yet it never comes out except when its laundered
No not the dirty money
The dirty mummy, silly
That's what I mean
And they reveal their mysteries
Inside a false magazine

Magazine People

Magazine People
They are ruined radishes
Playful carrots in the field
Felled cabbages in baskets
Brussel Sprouts whose storks
Have lost their zeal

They are greens gone black
Chard that's gone hard
All the wet lettuces of a farmer's yard
They are onions that smell
And garlic gone rotten
And piles of peas gone soggy at the bottom
Strung out parsnips and hung up runner beans
And this is what I think of their magazine

Their world is a balderdash
Their lives are a joke
They fill up their time
With mirrors and smoke
And none of them know
What they really mean
Now this is what I think of their magazine

They are liars and cheats
And cowards and scoundrels
Sheep that bleat
Horses hooves and pigs feet
And rotten chicken dirty meat
Fouled by the fowl it comes from

They're over-salted pork
And twisted metal fork
That gets stuck their teeth
And jerks
And all the above and some underneath
I can ascribe to my general belief
That all their words are daisies under a mower
Headless ineffective
An insult to the sewer
And soon their seed dies
For it falls on fallow ground

And their crops will fail
Their birds make no sound
It will become like after
On nuclear scene
Now this is what I wish for their bloody magazine

They could make it better
But their vision is so mean
No hope for the future
Only keep doing what is clean
And sanitary and safe
And nothing worth spit
Just a puddle of martyr's blood
Has washed down their screen

And their front covers lie
About what has been
And which celebrity does what
With whom and in between
There lies nothing of substance
Nothing to glean
Just another pack of lies
With each new page that's seen

And this is what I think of their magazine

Magazine

See their faces in the magazine
All traces of the scum they've seen
Obliterated in the cases of
Top quality wine drunk through a skein

All the faces on the magazine
These old rotten guys, these girls
In the knackers yard
These caked on masks
They light comments that bask
In the glory of former days

Those days of Hey,
Of when the grass was green
Those faces in the magazine

Whose faces are they we've seen
Bits of our own broken skin?
Flaking pieces of a jigsaw puzzle
Because if you don't ask the questions
Of your own life in childhood
Beyond a certain point
It doesn't exist
And no amount of interviews
Can ever summon back those summers
Except on the covers of those Magazines

Those film stars of films that they've starred in
Like your own lives only you jarred
And forgot to grin
Or grinned to hard
And lost the musket, lost the mustard gas mask
So you choked slightly all summer
After the war
And in the yard your pet dog died
In an agricultural accident
But it didn't play out that way in the film
It was edited down when they cut that scene
Just so it would fit into the magazine

So what we want are the lies
Fill us with bull shit
Make us eat pork pies
There are no more spies
No more double agents
Double pages of print
Of ties that leave you
With tears in your eyes
Nothing but splints, crutches
Pig sties and butchers
Who hold up bloody shoulders of lamb
That has been fattened on the green
That once frolicked on the
Pages of the zine