Chameleon in the Shadow of the Night
German Overalls
Slender Threads
Rock and Role
In the End
What's it Worth?
Easy to Slip Away
Dropping the Torch
(In the) Black Room
Mannheim: rainy Saturday with no money nor friend... only Tequila can end the boredom. Try to reach London for a pocket of hope; we're children, we grope in the dark. Hugh spends his last Mark on coffee and cheese... I feel just like a refugee.... Rathaus-keepers and traffic police, middle-aged maids with rotting teeth, industrial magazines and old Sunday Times: reading material/bleeding lines. What are we doing here? Memorial menace, eager for revenge, has begun to bend our minds. Shower-curtain imperative in the presence of acid; now, feeling placid is death. I try to hold my breath as the P.A. comes down.... here we all are in Ktown! The Big Wheel never fails to grind around... it drags me up/it drugs me down. Seven senses wonder 'Can this be real, Or am I become a performing seal?' Why are we dying here? I walk the streets alone, try to find a sign of love. I've crushed the plaster-bone in the freaky clubs. I have bit the fruit but all I live for is to play and I'm tired of the nights and the days of airports, taxis and motorway showers, groping for a key in the afterhours. David takes to travelling in the van, he knows that we all can understand: we're at the mercy of the Kosmos tour, making a pilgrimage to the German Lourdes... but we're still crippled here. Cathedrals spiral skywards; I think I'm getting vertigo. I think I don't know what is real. One more sudden spotlight; one more madness is over; I must not show a sign of fear. Words echo round my ears, I think I'm going to laugh... think I'll just go and take a bath, guess I'll wash my clothes, don't you know I'll grow to go and make my name, maybe be a servant in the Famegame; stake my sane and rest my life on the line.... Now lay me asunder and rend my mind; at the fall of the curtain let this be my ghost.
I saw your picture in the Evening Standard, you were wearing your battle dress. I really must confess that I shed a silent smile for you-- it had really blown my mind. I wonder, are you still so kind? Are you still so pure? There are other rhymes around here somewhere, but I'm not too sure how they fit.... Jenny, penny for your thoughts, I wonder how you're thinking now; I hesitate to visualise; our worlds are much too different, that's a sign of the times. Time was when I read your cards and wrote the numbers in the dust; I can't remember what they were but, anyhow, I missed the cusp. So, so long, and so, goodbye. Do you think I'd recognise you by your hair or by your mind now? We start out together but the paths all divide; when there are no more crossroads I open my eyes and find I'm walking on alone through the snowy cold.... I wonder if I'll make it through the night? I'm an author and an actor too; you're a model in the zoo... I'm just thinking on which side of the bars I'm looking through. If I prophesied an avalanche would you wait and call my bluff? If I gave you just a little song would that be enough to save your life or is the knife already turning in my hand?
Watch for the silent moment, only waiting to be saved. Wait for the Liemaker: he comes again and sinks his barbs through honesty: roll him over with all possible speed! Don't let him touch you with the candle of his need or let him be, hysterically ravaging your grave. You are emotion picture, re-run at single frame. You are the instant playback, no chance for change; smile and smile, living diary! Roll you over before it's too late; before you're exposed to the monochrome phase which can relate only fear and hate through the haze. I am the automated arrow, homing on the heat of pain; I am the Peacebringer...it is so strange, I feed on grief and grieve through joy. So roll me over and turn aside; don't let me look into the mirror of your eyes for fear that I may steal the life you gladly gave.
I promise you, I won't leave a clue: no tell-tale remark, no print from my shoe. Still, a steady trail to the water's edge... I will keep my pledge to the end: I intend to go free. No more rushing around, no more travelling chess; I guess I'd better sit down, you know I do need the rest.... Yes, it's time to resign with equanimity and placidity from the game. I can't explain; I can't relate.... Have I done it all too late? Now is the time for the commission to report; till lately, I thought I'd been planted. Trying hard to make it all come real, permission to feel is ungranted. But now it's happening I'd like to keep it private if I can; last words, last looks, make a final stand. Now my number's come up on the Pools, I guess I'll board the Titanic for a cruise.... Now is the time to make my status clear, too late, I fear, and lonely, as friends and enemies traverse the stage; all in a rage disown me. And all the pit-props shatter into dust about my ears: memory and conscience, hope and fear. As I crawl out further on the limb something tells me I am crawling in to unknown prophecies and lives the rainbow's end is hemmed around with knives.... As I stand on the boards and the stage lights grow dim, shall I go out of doors, or shall I maybe go in? Have I reached the point when I should take my cue and follow you and your signs? I can't remember my lines as the prompter cat-calls and the cards all fall in the strike. All the pages are thin, all the corners are curled. Does the starshine fall in through my window on the world? Or am I living out (the seeds of doubt) a chronicle of revenge? The willow bends as do my hands; do you understand? And will you still be my friend in the end? When my mouth falls slack and I can't summon up another tune, shall I then look back and say I did it all too soon?
What's it worth to be safe? What's the way to be sane? I can throw myself at the garden on my hands, prune the lawn and mow the roses, but I never understand how to go to be free; in the end I only want to be me. Winter days here are mine; still, no bites...what's my line? I could hurl myself to the bonfire with all verve, clear the path and weed the dead leaves, but I really just don't have the nerve to be part of that scene... is this just some kind of strange dream? Think I'll walk to the steeple, where the people are so inquisitive. I could make it to the corner store and buy a hoard of derivatives now. Which way now...climb or coast? Will my eggs ever poach? I could throw myself in the frying pan for my name; hit the road or smile hermetically, but it's really never quite the same: every time a subtle twist. I think I'll grab my plot and simply exist. Or would that be a subtle slash at my wrists?
My friends, I never really thought you'd go, but, then, we know that's the way it happens here. Now time is like cat's cradle in my hands: I gather up the strands much too slowly. The refugees are gone...they take their separate paths, obliterate the past, figures in an ash shroud. Susie, I guess you're on your way to be a star, but I don't know where you are; the only time I seem to see you is on the TV It's so easy just to slip away.... Mike! It's a year or two since I've seen you.... I might have dropped you a line if I'd had time or the will. It's my fault too: I play a hermit's role of cars and stages, wages, supersoul, hardly ever seem to get outside these days. So, dear friends, as we grow on we feel to grow away, can only live in the hope that some day it will all return. It's so easy to slip away....
We play games and every move is noted down as a subsequent cause and effectively chains our freedom and will to live; we settle in to simple survival, hanging on our pleasures grimly... we must never let them go. Our prison walls are slowly built, stone by stone and day by day; no provision for escape, entombed alive in safety and decay. Time sets around us in killing frames, black border round our names. Our fingers lose their grip and the torch slips. The enemy for everyone is everyone, inside. I feel the hand of security creep on me with ice-cold fingers and crush my flower of freedom; I've lost the course of my adventure, all the things I'd meant to do are lost. There is only one flame each to keep alive in the wind. But finally we snuff them out all by ourselves. We set traps and, in the end, fall into our own snares and have nowhere to go. Time ever moves more slowly; life gets more lonely and less real.
I was thinking about thinking but it really didn't get me very far, so I thought I'd throw a Tarot, but I only got the Priestess and the Star. There's a shadow cast between the future and the past; the room and I agree to buy some time.... The cards don't tell truth nor lies, only options and cusp lines: the furniture in the black room. I've been thinking about acid, but, it seems, there's not a reason to believe. I don't make a vital breakthrough and it walks me like a dog upon a lead. It's all unreal and, the way I feel, I'd like to try and make it on my own.... Going to the feelies is fine: I really have me a good pleasure cruise. But, deep in my mind, I'm no better or worse, just open to the walls. Paint peels in the black of my room. I'm only talking about myself, ordering the treasure shelf, documenting these present feelings as the future sets me reeling.... What I'll be is what I am, I'm simply trying not to sham or fake. Use vision as sense and not as crutch! It doesn't matter all that much; whatever happens we'll all survive, I'm only trying not to pawn my life. When I'm (maybe) old and strait-laced, shall I then deny all that I feel? In words of bitter compromise, re-smelt the wrath that's in my eyes like steel? Be a hermit then? Or be a miser? Be a man who hasn't managed yet to write his rules? The Fool? The future holds my hand in the room.... Well, then, my ghosts shall steer down through the years and lay a hand upon my soul like ice. So: onto the familiar top steps! In cloud-scud moonlight glow the Tower reels. I, the blind man, feeling for a path I know... don't you know that I'm only feeling for how to feel? Rats run. Snakes coil. Fathers stare out at the whispering night; rub mud on their arms. Spiders. Mud boils. Children whimper in the human vortex; faces glow of worms. THUNDER Silence. Omens.... I think it's coming, all signs are very near, all signs are that pain shall come and change shall run down through my heart and shake my knees and now it is coming, all around is the humming of the World. Too late, with my balance gone, dead-eyed doll, I'm falling, falling back to where I began.... I'm feeling like a kid again, I'm feeling like I just walked in the door, and with my head on fire I wrote this song - I don't know who it's for. Hands held fast in camera, I'll swear I heard the Stammerer exclaim: "I am a traveller, unraveller, I only live through pain, and shame, and change!" In my room, the secret tomb, I can see future forms, space/time storms: they're all me, and I've only got to choose! In my head I am dead if I fall in the trap, the subtle lap, safety's pall.... but I'm living while I choose....