Octopus complex

 I've got an octopus complex

I want to have 8 arms

And be able to feel

The things that I feel

I'm sure I can come to no harm

I've got the octopus complex, doctor

It came from my mother who was an actor

She over dramatized events

Like when we went camping it got too intense

I spent the next 8 days in bed

That's how I ended up with an octopus in my head

I've got the octopus complex something bad

In fact I think you can blame it on my dad

He spent every penny he ever had

On making me as many enemies, so sad

And now I can only keep 8 friends in the world

Well I should have had the oyster complex

And fallen in love with a pearl

I've got the octopus complex, and I wish I didn't bother

But it all started out with the birth of my brother

Ever since then, I've wanted to control other men

And it's left me with this feeling I must control them

So I became an octopus teacher, but it turned out I was more of a preacher

And told them God was an Octopus, and man was only a creature

I've got an octopus complex and I blame it on my sister

She was born 8 years before me, and each year is like step on ladder that leaves

Poor me

On the bottom rung, always trying to climb up

So I become an octopus and then I can drink tea from a cup

And sip soup from a spoon and eventually I'll run for president

But probably not until next June

I've got an octopus complex, where I think I am a man

When actually I'm an octopus just tryin' to do what I can

And it's hard tryn'to juggle life work and money

Mix in with that bills and loans then things ain't so funny

Well it's lucky I've got 8 hands to handle all the telephones

But only one mouth to speak from when I'm on my own

Yes I'm an octopus I must confess, that's why you've found

Lobster claws in my draws and shell fish in my stationary

They are only snacks, that they don't serve at Greggs

And it's been hard tryin' not to over satisfy my woman in bed

There are many things an octopus can do better than a man

But thinking himself something better than the rest of us

Takes an octopus man

I've got an octopus complex, I want to shake every hand

And greet every low down as if he's a great man

But when it comes to the over compensating attention

When I leave a group of people I squirt ink in their direction

How to make friends and influence people

Just come to my church hear me preach

Under the Octopus steeple

In the museum of modern love

Well I am walking in the museum of modern love

I am talking in the museum of modern love

In the museum of modern love

Well I am all alone in the shadows

I am all alone in the dark

In the museum of modern love

Where cattle are calling and bees are buzzing

Down the walls of the palisade

In the museum of modern love

In the museum of modern love

Where our hearts are art on display

And they are kept inside glass cabinets

Waiting for a visitor to pay

To see them in the museum of modern love

In the museum of modern love

You can see them, you can look but do not touch them

Yes you can see them every day

And the liars/Lyres are calling in the shadows of the walls

And cherubims are singing as their plaster friezes fall

From the museum of modern of love

Where the paintings are hung down the darkened halls

And the thunderbolts of ancient Gods

Crack and splinter the backs of winter wonder statues

And the pairs of footless shoes, and handless gloves

Stand or lie on plinths where majestic black horses trod

In the museum of modern love

In the museum of modern love

Venus has grown back her arms

And she is in the arms of Mars

Who's stolen hearts and cars

And the policewoman is throwing

Off her uniform

And Mr Universe is looking at David's statue

Like he is no good at sport

As if love is just pumping blood

Through an Iron heart

In the museum of modern love

And the curator is pulling down the curtains

Crying let the light shine in

And the dust particles settle on the quantum heart

Who says am I here or am I not?

Am I the air or the arrow shot?

Am I a wave or am I a dart?

In the museum of modern love

And so take your ticket and come on in

But keep your coat on, for the cold gets in

And the men falter, and the women win

In the museum of modern love

Where Picasso's poltergeist is thin

And slips between the paper leaves of the magazines

That are left on table tops in the gift shop

Where you can buy back a postcard of your heart

On your way out of the museum of modern love

Give them a flitch of Bacon

 Give them a flitch of bacon, ya hear

And send them on their way

They've been married for a whole year 

And they wouldn't take back a day

Carry them aloft our shoulder

They are young but will grow older

And as they say

Give them and inch and they take a mile

Oh give them a flitch today

Give them a fllitch of bacon I told yer

Put it on top and carry them all over

Town and sing out, raise merry shout

Give them a flitch today

If they've got a flitch, they won't scratch that itch

So give them a flitch today

Toad

 It's six o'clock in the morning and the church bell is beginning to toll

The towns folk are starting to get up somewhere between the yellow

musk of street light and their first coffee cup they are reborn

And I turn to you and ask are we what we were once?

And you look askance and say the heroes are in us

And they run out of the page, through drawings on the stage

And I must ask what is this age, but kettles and fans that switch on

And electronic devices, which never suffices our needs, our wants

Where is the human intimacy, where is the human touch?

And you turn to me in your sleep and say why must you ask for so much?

And there is something courageous about the act of rising

Something that habit gives the human and it can be surprising

How automatic, as a rabbit, wakes and leaves his tunnel

We all must stir outside our door down the street side funnel

Somehow the bell demands, in a deep sub-conscious seat

Where we obey a call to arms to protect and serve on our feet

We all must be standing in order to carry on

And though our road may be demanding we can hear our victory song

So stirring, rousing, rebelling we go, defying all the odds

Defiantly defeating, all the squandered times repeating

The capricious acts of the Gods

Yet with our feet we give thanks, to cows and fields and cowpats

And mud, and stone walls that define the boundary lines

Across which we call dogs and cats

And men with umbrellas and women in hats

Rain on the fellas and gals 

The boys and the girls in wellies

That splash

And so long as this can carry on

Then Wells can too

And I will wake to take to the road

And send up my prayers of thanks

To the toad with the lily wet flanks

Who sits like Buddha in the wayside

Before he crawls back under his stone

Hawk Talk

 Well it needed to happen, that is for sure

The eagle has flown

But there's blood at his door

And as he does roam

There's the rub I am poor

But rich to have a home in The old Silvermore

The kestrel flew down to my hand

But quickly I saw he was a friend

And we talked like two hawks

Of life and our work 

As we walked out over paths wend

And the places we knew were many

In the hearts chapters we dropped a penny

Down the well of memory

To hear it echo what you meant to me

And I can hear your voice still

Ringing through the years

And she flew like a siren call

Like a screech through blood boiling skies

And it took a wrecking ball

To knock down all the cloud castles where I lie

And if there is some bird I must let fly

It is that of your ghost

Feather bed where I lie

Make a nest for my last post

But I cannot accept that I quit

Through this artificial bull shit

For Brexit is a lie, the truth is goodbye

Is hardest to say when you really mean it

Making Hay

 Are you going to ret and scutch?

Are you going to build and bind?

Are you going beat them?

And will you flatten the threads of the flaxen kind?

Do you need an old thermometer?

To break the bridge of the old geometer.

Who is measuring his toes.

While the grass grows

Under his feet - it's a vomiter

 

Have you sawn the hill in two?

Have you toed the line?

Have you sown the seeds two by two

Crossing country with the country wine?

 

Is it a stain in your pocket?

Is it a thread of your cloak?

Will it pull south if you dead head it?

Who is getting your goat?

 

Oh, the pheasant beaters know it

Yes, they howl, and they grown

When the pheasants they show it

Bear their bleating breast like a crone

 

And ringing through the trees

Goes the shotguns report

Staggering to my knees

I clutch and I moan at the sport

 

And yes, I retch 

when I see the flak in the vetch

And I feel a pea through my sleep

Though my bed is six mattresses deep

 

So, will you ret it, for one more year?

For one more time

Will you scutch and bleed, and tear at the reed?

Will you beat it? Can you ever beat time?

 

But the hands that rock the cradle

are the hands that hold the plough

And some like Cain's on Abel's

Were blood stained after breaking a vow

 

And the lines on the palm of the peasant

Are like the streaks in feathers of a pheasant

They are red and brown, and deep and proud

Like his furrowed brow, under sleeping clouds

 

And what will we make with the flax fibres

Roll them and mat them in to webbed spiders

That cling and they brook their tenuous hooks

And settle in new arrangements their atoms

 

And lattices and matrices 

That mother nature's intricacies

Have patterned

And pat them like patter-cakes, break them and flatten

Them down

Like tortoise shells hunkered

Like the dense pellets of owls

The egg yolks that bind the albumin

In the year's photo albums

And the favourite jokes of friendship

That sadden when they've gone

Oh, make the ties that bind

As strong 

River out of Eden

I was running up the riverbed dry

She was naked lying in her bed

Her stones had not bled, and she could not cry

Her dress of water was locked in store

And she was cold lying on the floor

 

I ran up the Biddle combe brook

And it gave to me a sideways look

Who are you to trample on my bones?

Can't you see I lie alone

 

I need no other to claim my throne

Or cast about my care-worn stones

I am nature the mother grown

But no other shall me own

 

And in ripples and in childish tides

Her water dress trickled down over her thighs

And filled the dry bed where once she was wed

With its web-locked fingers, and its fluidity spread

And curled in crispness of a fresh salad bed

 

And I leapt like a monkey out of her flow

Her water cress dress would have swallowed me whole

In her water-caress I was a fungi

And I could listen to her glamorous story

Glistening soft as a velvet Jew’s ear

Of how she joined the Gulf stream

To travel away for a year

 

But she returned in the rain clouds

Heavy and all out of sorts

He had left her near the Isle of Iona 

For a Madagascan or Chilean sport

 

So she returned to her hilly spring 

She dressed herself in black,

And she lay in ground waters low in the basin

Of the Mendip hill's cavernous crack

 

She stayed like a widow in mourning 

She lay in a suicide pact

With the stalactites and stalagmites adorning

Her chamber of echoing fact

She called to her own deep reflection

And she spoke with the mirror of the cave

And it said you are the source on inspection

It is only from you we can make waves

 

So, go out into the world once again

When the cold air will not turn you to ice

And be like the river of Eden

That runs out through paradise