People of the setting sun

People of the setting sun
Look upon what you have done
The beauty fades in your eyes
Look once into their dying skies

People of the setting sun
I have come to walk among
The fire branded soulful ones
Out in the street as night comes

See their flags sail high
In the western breeze
Hear their trumpets sound retreat
To the Mountains and the trees

Know the customs of the Hun
People of the setting sun
East meets West invested in
The bloody tide of Hungry skin

Far beneath where shadows shun
All the curtain calls begun
The cast walk out on to the stage
The setting scene for another age

Open up the cuts which run
Deep red blood of dying sun
Flowing from the mother
Down to her son
In the streets, the budding streets
People of the setting Sun

Ladles of Letters, Sandals of Sand

What light through adjacent window breaks?
Smother me in all your kisses speak
Of soft nothings in my ear
Gertrude was my love in all the wild west
My Wind in all the eves
She spoke as angels do from bed clothes
Irons the sheet music of  METAL DAWN
rOBOTS KNELT WHEN SHE OPENED
Her mouth to yawn
Yes she was queen bee to me

The moths and spiders knew her as Frank
They stole her ignition keys
St Agnes and Ignacio stank
Of the filthy knowledge they were rich in

And blue bottle flies sang her tune
Above a jazz city under a full moon
All interstate numbers were re-registered DOOM
As Columbus fingered the jury

He spoke without looking blind was his faith
His East was his West, phenomenologically obtuse
Dialectical materialism versus un-real proof
THat God is a sandwich and love is his roof

Because in the house of the sung out praise
All oil paintings are dripping with the last days
The sign of the times, The Zeds in a road
That Zig-Zag like a yellow brick trail to Oz

The Label of Love

Something in the blue slit of sky
Something there beneath the horses hoof
Trodden into the mud a foot print of proof
That love lives, in its many colours
In its perennial return as a weed in the garden of Eden
But who calls love a weed?
Most call it a rose, and tend to it nurture it
But is this passion?
This thorny crown of roses we grow
Is it this sex that pushes up all the daisies?
This unearthing of the forgotten death
We sweep under the carpet
Speak of in hushed breath
In quiet tones when we are alone
And face what passes for fear
Of ourselves

A time upon a storm

Who's fretting now
God disagrees,
His glorious vengeance reaped out on the seas
Who's fretting now
The tumble weed blows
The door creaks
Nobody speaks
And nobody knows

Who's fretting now in the light trees
Planted like tombs from heaven
Dropped like bombs from the grave
Of the Somme
Where someone died
One or other

It takes a certain kind of craziness to cut and run
Especially if there is nobody there pointing a gun
You choose your annihilation according to your will
Pick your poison that pill to kill
You swallow and you don't look back or if you do
It will be too late
Yes there's a time to love and a time to hate
A time to save a life
A time to kill
Whose gonna tell you when the time is right
Nobody at your back holding a knife
You just imagine the persecutor there
Before the open window
Taking in the air

Once upon a lightening storm
I was riding,
Rode through the shadows of my past
Flashing up in memories
Some distant remembered scene
Lightening in the brain
Life goes by so fast
It seems like only yesterday
You were riding with me
Stormy weather blowing cloud ships through the sky
Treading soft as angels
Broken glass in front of me
Cinderellas' slippers in the hall

Sitting in a glass house
A vast house, the last house
The last time some such a voice did call
God he had to disagree
Put an end to misery
And miserly collect the fall

Where do moths fly in lightening storms?

Pearls

Take me too the mountain top
Make it stop, make it stop
Make all this hurt and pain just stop

What is loving
What is it?
Is it salt is it grit
Is it that grain in the oysters shell
That's rolled around
Through years of hell
Discomfort and pain
To make what
Something vain?

To make what? A pearl
The most valuable gem in all the world
Just look at it possess it
Put it on a string and make a necklace
Hang it there with pride
Because you know love's many sides
Have made it smooth
Not golden but mysterious like the moon
Too delicate to touch
I want to hold you so much
But I can't let it go
I can't sell my soul
Or perhaps I can,
I already have
Now I live in a clam
Buffeted by the wave
I just have no sign of a grain of sand
To rub in my own wound
To coat in my own silver fish flesh
My own fish scale clothes
That I wear underwater
Where all the fish breath

All the world's your oyster
That's what they say
Only all I want to know is:
Where's my pearl today?

Bridgwater in the rain

I remember in bridgwater
road in the rain
All those bloody traffic jams
All those

I remember bridgwater in the rain
And the roads that flowed
Out
The forests on the verge
That never emerge
From the corners
Of your blinkered vision

I remember the turns
And the dips in the road
Of the little old track
That ran
Down past the willows
Down past the the peat centre
And the Marshes that lay
Asleep in our hands

Do they still run,
Do the rivers still flow
The way I remember them in my youth
Do the roads still subside
And dip and dive
Do those same Peat tractors
Still pull their black load?
I suppose
They do

But what if its changed
If the falling rain
Has washed all foot prints away?
What of the people, their voices
Their triumphs
What if their hearts couldn't stay?
What then for my hopes of returning
What then for the time of a life
that's kept burning?
What if the jack knifed
Lorry is blocking the road
And the hearts blood is pumping
Its heavy load
And its blood is black with the peat
That its knowed
And the rain washes all this blackness
Away, away

All in a day's work

The saluting general came by this way

Forgiving all the ink

He had his pig

He had his sway

He painted them all in pink

And nuts fell from the balding sky

Like hair down in the sink

And I asked - lord why must we die?

And he said why do you think?

I said I think the jelly

The jelly, what the hell?

I said yeah I think the Jelly

When it rolls you cannot tell

But when it rolls, you know you live

You know you don’t wanna die

So, keep them pennies falling from heaven

And in time the good saints will fly