from genesis to revelation

Calling all stations...can anybody hear me?

We can't dance around it.

The evidence of autumn, for you as well as for me, is when what you thought was a simple misunderstanding at dusk turned into no reply at all, when I went out looking for someone and a place to call my own.

For years - and then there were three, at least - I was counting out time, in the cage and the waiting room, only ever on the shoreline of my life. This is the way of the world, you said. So I sat shipwrecked in stagnation behind the lines, swearing that there must be some other way.

I think you were in too deep, in that quiet earth of a home by the sea. Really, you were taking it all too hard, when you insisted, tell me why; I had already said, please don't ask and please don't touch. But no, for you, you just had to be a part of anything she does.

Well, keep it dark, I say. Like it or not, your little illegal alien found it all in a mouse's night to slip out the window toward the place where the sour turns to sweet. Am I very wrong, to dislike being in limbo, in hiding?

It's not for absent friends that you turn it on again, staring out the open door to see me and Sarah Jane getting molested by the man on the corner. You might recall that for me, living forever in that place was just a job to do. Certainly, I saw no visions of angels blessing your time table.

I'm sure that if I walked back into that land of confusion, you'd say, "you're no son of mine," and it'd be just another day in paradise for you. But since I lost you, I've been on the up, inside and out. I've pulled myself up from the undertow. I'm no longer snowbound. I'm off the burning rope.

Who dunnit, you wanted to know - wot gorilla came so deep in the motherlode one day to perform such aggressive and audacious robbery, assault and battery upon your precious chamber of so many doors? It would have been nice, along the dividing line, if you could find it within yourselves to say, it's not about us; we'll make small talk, if that's what you need.

Just too much blood on the rooftops for me, that's all. It's gonna get better, I thought - maybe not tonight, but someday, out there in the wilderness. New horizons surely await, after the ordeal. And if not...well, more fool me.

That was my trick of the tail, my dance on a volcano, my one for the vine. Since the day the light went out, you've had uncertain weather under the silent sun. It's been like one long alien afternoon.

Make it a winter's tale, make it a fireside song, but there's never a time when you can do anything now. Do you phret about it still, how you became one man's fool? How you're alone tonight, and always were?

Mama says, supper's ready, but papa he said "I'm not moving", put another record on, and that was that. It put her down and out, it did. She didn't want to be a duchess. She just wanted you to say it's alright, Joe. And lest you think the lady lies...

Let's follow you follow me, here. See some scenes from a night's dream - that's me dreaming while you sleep - where I tipped the last domino and ventured beyond the silver rainbow to see the battle of epping forest. I longed to be a fly on a windshield in the colony of slippermen.

In the beginning, the serpent and the conqueror ruled over the white mountain as watchers of the skies. They drank from the fountain of salmacis, dancing with the moonlit knight and taking in the cinema show whenever the mad man moon was shining.

Entangled with the ripples of their own afterglow, they regarded the ravine as being full of many too many carpet crawlers with hairless hearts - lilywhite liliths, the lot of them. They much preferred their own cuckoo cocoon in which for the lamia to thrive.

In your own special way, you ensured that there were always unquiet slumbers for the sleepers and that every lurking dodo would follow the guide vocal like an invisible touch. Sign your life away to us now, or else you'll run out of time with nowhere else to turn. There are no other aisles of plenty in the cul-de-sac, and any duke's travels will soon become the duke's end.

Anyway, I know what I like: it's in your wardrobe. Among the grand parade of lifeless packaging (really, you could have done with a second home by the sea) are seven stones and the musical box, the knife with which I never cut myself - I hope you didn't decide to start throwing it all away. Worse yet, you might have instructed the banjo man to get 'em out by Friday.

Maybe this letter is driving the last spike, or maybe it's setting your hearts on fire, stirred from the fading lights of the heathaze. You've been pushing your silent sorrow in empty boats all day until paperlate, just waiting for the return of the giant hogweed, the harlequin that makes your match of the day.

I'd have to charter a submarine if I ever truly meant to find myself back in NYC as such. It's not safe, in the rapids. I'm not so adept as I once was at riding the scree. So until the light dies down on broadway, just tell yourself, hold on my heart. Praying for crumbs, for the squonk to stop crying, is for pigeons.

Here comes the supernatural anaesthetist, now, to make happy the man of our times.

unused songs:

Harold the Barrel
Can-Utility and the Coastliners
Firth of Fifth
The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway
Broadway Melody of 1974
Los Endos
Eleventh Earl of Mar
Ballad of Big
Vancouver
Abacab
Naminanu
Me and Virgil
The Brazilian
Jesus He Knows Me
Congo
7/8