Good Bye Vienna

Well its goodbye Vienna

And so long Saigon

Hello Honolulu

And my love is long gone

Ten thousand miles

On the blade of a knife

But it never cut me once

Not like my life

I shot through the country

And into the yard

And at the back of the city

My head hit down hard

Well its ten thousand borders

That I need to cross

But just one line between us

That decides a win or a loss

And I don’t like to gamble

With my heart in that way

Its already a shamble,

like a needle in the hay

I’ve lost my bearing

Somewhere on your map

And you’re out of my hearing

As you sit on my lap

There’s a wild unknown country

Where I must go

And so its out of the city

And on with the show

Where do those rails run?

Cold iron, cold iron
Where do these rails run?
Into the cold heart of the country
Into the hearts of everyone

Cold iron in my soul
A sliver of shrapnel
Just the last part
Of the bullet in my heart
Where you shot me

Cold iron, cold iron
Come to take my cares away
From the cold, cold morning
Of the railway

Cold iron in the north wind
Cold iron to the west
All I see are cold iron people
Wearing their chain mail vests

Come lay down your sleepers
Come lay them to rest
Cold iron creepers
Like vipers leaving the nest

Up past the scrub-land
Of the good intention
Out to the bone white trees
Into the frozen hands
Of a cold morning's breeze
Too cold to carry pretension

Some rails lead nowhere
Some tracks are dead
Some are like wild hair
Growing on a homeless man's head

Some sleepers are just rotten
They never find a bed
They can sleep no longer-they've forgotten
How to rest their heads

But the cold iron will remains
Even if their rails
Will carry no more trains

Their intention has been hammered down
By nine inch nails
Coffin ground, coffin ground
I can hear that coughin' sound
From the heart and lungs on fire
Smoke pours out from Hell's choir

Coffin ground where they lay their iron
Across the world, made their bed to lie on
Where are those rails running?
The devil knows and his cunning
Where have them rails run?
From hell below to heaven's sun

Let you go

I'm sorry I never meant to go
Down the streets against love's flow
Where people always fight
The sons of darkness
The daughters of light
To the towers of despair
I never meant to meet you there
I never meant to climb their stair

Just to find you
Just looking for you
I never meant to die for you
To seek you, or lie for you
In the pond of regret
Where we ponder and reflect
We are just tear drops
causing a ripple effect
Twisting beauty out of shape
Making pain in the neck nape

But slowly the image that was perfect
Has gone, its shattered like an ice lake
With the cracks in its surface
I began to lose your face
In the memories I make

I'm sorry I never meant to let you go
In the river's turbid flow
I never meant to let you drown
Or let you down
Now you're the queen
And I'm the clown

The War of the Roses

You give them away

A petal a day

A piece of your heart

For you own peace of mind

The Queen of hearts turned down her thumb

The ax fell, what's done is done

Another dead head

In the rose garden of her soul

The white and the red

They fight in your bed

And prick your sides with their thorn

It was more truth than lies

That tore at your pride

And it hurt just like being born

Oh please tell me why

When all loves may die

Must the War of the Roses rage on?

They cut up their soldiers

In a paper chain

And send them marching into the fray

Again, and again

But you just give them away

A petal a day

A paper heart inside a paper cup

No use screwing up

Those love letters you never sent

Just to scribble them again to vent

Your frustrations on the situation

It is impermeable, like a fish tank

You can’t get out

And everyone just watches you

Swimming around and about

With no particular purpose

No definite scheme

Just a clown in a circus

Or a boat adrift in a stream

No one said life was a bed of Roses

You made your bed now lie in it

We all wear the thorny crown

Each have our crosses to bear

There must come a night

Between the white and red light

When you have to decide to pick a side

So please tell me why

When all love may die

Must the War of the Roses

Rage on?

Women on a train

Women on a train
Like snakes on plane
Biting like vipers, shaking their mane
Drinking their vodkas in the quiet zone
The quiet zone, you did hear me right
"Quiet Zone" - "To RELAX" I want to shout
But they party on, toasting cheering
Not that I'm a killjoy
I just enjoy the peace and quiet
And I felt my employ
Hard enough this last month
To buy it

Therefore we had right on our side
Didn't we? We did!
And that is why I sidled up ta
The ticket conductor
To explain what the sign forbid
And point out their errant
rule breaking
As if some truant kid

In my mind they were due a detention
And I was the rat who dobbed them in
For my part I don't regret it,
They spoiled our journey
With their raving, bad behaving,
Their mock yawning
As if to show others respect were boring
And so they deserved their comeuppance
And receive a dose they did
Although a gentle but firm reprimand
At the hand of the conductor / the train God
Who gave them a scolding showed them the iron rod

Their eyes flickered in unnerving vengeful certainty
Seeking out their accuser / me
The atmosphere quietened to a whisper
Of the forked tongues of snakes hissing
Behind their teeth

The joke was on them in the end
And we alighted from the car
The trail of their wounding scar
Across their backs
Yet what conceited creatures were they

Pangs

I have pangs of sadness
Pangs of regret
Temporary things I cannot forget
Fleeting as sea gulls
Across summer skies
Like islands in the river
That rise then subside

I have pangs like shoulders
I shrug
Pangs like ripples
In an otherwise smooth rug
Pangs I want to iron out
Pangs that will not flatten
That want to shout

There are bitter fruit
That will not ripen
That hang on low branches of my gut
So low they brush the ground
Where weevils turn, worms are found
And the apples turn brown

Pangs like shattered glass in my soul
Like glass slippers I stole
But could not give back
Pangs of a dance
Where my feet were flat
And the music stopped
And when I got off
There were no more pangs
After that

Fan Club

I decided to start a fan club
But only I turned up at the pub
Apparently nobody likes a fan
Half as much as they like a can

So I ordered half a pint
And sat there thinking half the night
Of why it was no one likes fans
Instead they prefer driving white vans

I asked the man on the bar stool
Do you like a hand powered tool?
One that will keep you cool at night
He thought that I wanted some kind of fight

Next I said to the bar tender
How about you my great pretender?
Do you like it when the arms swing round
He merely passed behind the glasses making little sound

That I thought was just typical
You try to have a conversation about something quite topical
And they get the impression you are a fool
When really what I am on about they learnt about in school

A fan club as I see it,
Is made up of fans
There needs to be more than one of them
To come up with any plans

Of course who needs a fan in winter?
No one I hear you cry
The weather does for us
What the fan would try
Even in a tropic storm
Or in a Hurricane
The wind is blowing (often warm)
And sometimes there is rain
Does one need a fan then
No of course not said I
But before the Invention of the fan
all we had was wind and sky

After my brief reverie
My mind returned to the bar
It was hot, and the men were sweltering
Outside on the road was sticky tar

What I think we all need now
I said to my companions with a smile
Is a machine that blows cool air
And it takes off the heat for a while

Now they started to agree
And I saw the nodding heads
Then I just reiterated what I before had said
This is the time of the fan
So who is with me gentlemen?
The men stood up, and raised their cups
Said to the fan building station

And so we filed out the pub
The bar tender included -
Whether he left his grub, I have not concluded
And we walked to my garden shed
Of the community allotment hub

Getting out bamboo and tools
We began to build a fan
At first it looked like a wind mill
And was too gigantic in size
Next we dismissed that idea
For our Mk 2 version realized

It was your average 2 meter armed affair
The radial distance being sufficient
To give a good blast of air
How we thought would it now turn?
Since the problem was the lack of wind
Some body who was a cyclist ran off to find
His bicycle

What goes around comes around
So the saying goes
And once we had hooked up his bike
Our medium fan did blow
All it required now was a willing worker
We decided in the pub to take turns
Each half hour

This gave each a break and each some
Little exercise
As it was the process did take
more than a minute but less than nine to five

So thankfully installed now back inside the pub
We each could enjoy the nice cool air
As we supped our beverage or devoured our grub
It was the perfect solution to a hot summer's day
I had found my fan club
And there's the rub - what fans of fans were they?

There was one exception - that is the peddler
He would get too hot poor guy
Til he went pink as a pig in a pig sty
We had to rescue him with another fan
Madam Butterfly