GLORY HUNTER
mismanaged, well marketed, teenage malcontent makes number one in the billboard chart. dancing millionaire, moronic masterpiece. one thousand cleats to the skull and counting. columnists cooking up a ‘local lad done good’, dining on the grave of bernays. social courtesies. everyone's a winner. cover bands, wedding bands, tribute bands - no thanks. explain a tax haven in layman’s terms or another story about some glory hunter. a beacon of bourgeoise prejudice burns over this and all else; the hollow glow of the day time panel show, floating through homes with well played word play - harmless humour. wide awake with estate agents fornicating on your face with first time buyers in debt until death. we are all a digital display sign, counting down to ideas about as weird and wonderful as an ikea flat-pack kitchen cabinet. push-button marionette; drink responsibly, be business savvy, be not alone, be a piece of moss on a dry stone wall. let’s call this sham a preamble to an outro. given time enough everyone you trust will in a small but certain way betray you. that's just truth, not cynicism or some lame-hack-poetic-vision for artistic drama. live slow, die whenever in the strong arms of a millionaire husband that looks like your father. another choreographed celebrity car crash, flash of bleached teeth and deep sense of something rather sarcastic. it's all a laugh that doesn't last long. childhood icon as long dead as orphan hair extensions.
GREEN TIME
in the green time, through it all. try to find mine through the fog. try to be light through the daylight. then we ran some. then we ran some. in the green time, through it all. try to find mine through the fog. let it go to seed my friend. let it go to seed. then of course it fell away, just like it always does.
HAMMER ON THE HUNT
she said to me ‘let’s have an affair’. i said ‘no, i really do not care to’. then, walking on my own to my b&b bed with my head full of grape, and the stones in the walls of the town hall here kind of proud all peering down upon me, holding out my phone trying to send a lonely text to my wife i expect is asleep in our home in a flat on a street, where the brick’s red and the road’s raging - a world away from the place that i find myself in; dead calm evening in a land where i can’t understand what they’re saying, but they’re paying me fair and they feed me for the singing of a song or two, it’s easy, every day is new, pack the car, play another gig. living life like a hammer on the hunt for the heads of nails sticking out of front doors. not sure much of anything, but hope in the end that i might just win, or at least find a certain kind of peace or reason in a world that at times seems so wrong. it was a cold day for rain but it came all the same; real harsh and hard and mean. so i popped the collar on my long coat, and i hoped that my lover lays warmly as i lean on the wall of the old town hall with a match in my hand, and a smoke in the cleave of my lips where my teeth show - near white as the eyes at a freak show, or the moon all ridiculous and low like the hopes of a lot of us far away from home.
LIVE FROM NO MAN’S LAND
live from no man’s land, here’s one for the underdog, honest lawyers and brave big game hunters posing for posterity purposes beside the corpse of an endangered trophy. gilded in poisonous pride the peacock spreads his fan. it was nearing dawn and the moon it grew drowsy. the trick of the tired ticket tout, the whine of the manufactured magic internet poker. go get over yourself already - be done with it, raze the whole place and make way for a new runway. with any luck they say you'll retire to a golf course, oil rig resort, upturned yacht or forklift truck rust yard, while the other half busy petitioning for a slave labour memorial fountain in the grounds of buckingham palace. we awoke on a balcony, waving down on a crowd of people dominated by guerrillas in cahoots with trendy drug dealers. dragging empty trophy cabinets through congregations, waving sick bags like flags at media hack psychologists. more carnival master manipulator sideshow, award-winning actress, the celebrated media personality, the telly show favourite, the busty glamour model, celeb with chequered history, the stunning movie star and last but not least - the car bombs in gaza. stripped naked, flogged with selfie sticks, then led along a screaming crowd to a mahogany guillotine. enter the headless waitress serving up her own nose cartilage on a refrigerated plate of fine china. when you’re done navel-gazing come join us - we'll be pacing the corridors of parliament with a billion bootlegged jg ballard novels and a bin liner bulging with over the counter downers, wearing a rat fur coat for the so-called serotonin injection honour killing. live from no man’s land.
FOOL’S ERRAND
we are a cheap suit, we are a soup kitchen, we are a jam jar raised to the lips of a hipster sipping cocktails in some pale imitation gentrified joke. these pokey tales of failure, flavoured with sweet promise, curled around tongues tasting defeat as deep as a news anchor’s hot tub. the drunk girl on the bus attacks some crushed accomplice as we slip by all gold and red by the mad bread man pecked to pieces by the pigeons in the park. re-enacting the backstabbing of a best friend in front of a panel of industry big-dogs, while media power couples snog and hold hands under posters of post-war hollywood heartthrobs. yes, it can drift into something like a shopping channel at a wedding flirting with a chemical weapons expert. your music sounds like it’s made to be played in shopping arcades on bank holiday weekends - silly singer songwriters, writing rhymes that read like middle class fridge doors. and when god looks the other way, we’ll be playing babel fishh on cassette tape, running with scissors, standing naked at the window urinating on your parade. they said we looked fed up and bored and they were dead right of course. girl being sick in a limousine, lonely lad walks around room. what was i to do? it won’t matter come the morning. a glorious failure. a last blossom blown loose. the final tear, a tango, a sword fight. finding a scratchcard in a british heart foundation purchased blazer on a warm winter’s day. and here’s another song about me taking myself too seriously - throwing parting shots at lost children in supermarkets. and the river looked to be sleeping, so still and deep. the ruins of a resort town and ten foot advertising slogans over faces. you don’t work your job, your job works you. blah blah blithering idiot - fool’s errand.
PRESS PACK / LYNCH MOB HERO
where's the dignity in any of this? get your cv out my face and pass the wine list mate. puny marked man in a media circus of corporate elite and street sweepers. democracy doesn't exist, at least not while sipping champagne watching the weak west limp along like a plump old git dumb to his imminent demise. you've earnt this. you deserve this. ignore reviews - all reviews - and court ignorance. pop is gut rot plopped atop lollipop sticks and sucked by the hideous futility-fancying mouths of bored, accepting, ignorant pawns fornicating with plug sockets. and our saints are sickly rich and proud, our proud are loud and clumsy. the predicament of power in the jaws of power hungry. yeah this is our press pack. hashtag that. smiley.
and all the while when it came strong - in single file - headstrong. knocking off quiffs of a gargoyle. lopping off stone snout. grit-cold grin in the chilly old bowls of this bad town. and how we could’ve seen it fold in upon itself is beyond the minced mind of our masters. and fast as all the cannons kill, they be giggle-blurs of a slew too riddled to be worth salt. a pyramid inverted on the anus of a goat - a tattoo of a pyramid inverted on the anus of a goat. and how the bigger boys laughed, how they joke still.
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when the city kills off the poets and puts down the scoundrels all restless in custom comfort. sunken in the cracks of the paving, a real low loving, tracing the chalky streamers loosely flailing in this lavender eve. and how long have we been this tired for? ghosts of bombed spires over spines like misty crowns embodied in our beseeching arms, our weakening wrists and petri dish-pale palms. men fell here once and shall again; picture a prince clambering over toppled pylons, feasting in silos and breathing blank space in brackets. we held eyes, embraced, then raped the world in a picnic hamper on hampstead heath, while underneath our jubilation the financial district slipped out of focus and became beautiful; broken in all the warped colourings and awe. come clothe us in concern and peace of mind. i’m shivering naked in the belly of ecstasy and famished fame with two of your favourite celebrity wingmen as witness and narrator in turn to this massacre of moments - so very present. pig fat burns and so does power. we have all seen weeds win and kings turn to stone, so woe betide the mischievous nonsensical disputations spewed from troughs to be tongued as soft wounds on hard, harvesting hands. stand and study this despicable spectacle you shall all see me pirouette atop to fleck with some wretched worth. your clean truths will noose you. the air is balmy and leaves fall prettier than we. find me struggling to find a better way to say ‘i am disgusted’ then thump the red button. that something. that little something else. that first time you find yourself descending into a bitter little man. son watches father fail for the last time then drains the pond.
i have long loved it all. it was once near perfect. pan to left and hold the moving portrait. fade out slow, then cue the rapt revellers. send home the archers, then embark on the vast, inky night. feathers fall heavy. pig fat burns. city kills poet. air is balmy. lynch mob hero, truths noose you. lynch mob hero.
credits
DOWNPOURS OF APPLAUSE
a metaphor for nothing much. push-button marionette. let the sermon crawl into the sack and see it sink. colour coding falling sky - it looked a lot like scars; slits across a heaviness, emptiness vast. well you know when sometimes you see a thump of gold attack the sheen of a posh high rise block build, or you hear the sound of a sad bell tower clock galloping across a grey slate stone, gone. look out through the nails of rain to see the traffic dance, just the same as cannon fire in double time on screen. sunken eyes on the tube as metal echo man. thin edge of the wedge - brand spanking new. a broken obelisk of top notch beauty pageant fails or the flailing sails of a galley going deep. keep the change, fold the face... our dead queen. customer satisfied, unfurl flag. nothing's only as it seems. be the bigger man and be the damn fool. downpours of applause.