Category: Song

demo memo recorded in Baurisheen. Crows scratching the air in the back garden. Early September 2019. Look at where the time has gone, how is this possible?

See the line, it’s far away but
Getting closer all the time
I turn my back, try to run, but
Can’t escape what’s in my mind.

Anyway, anywhere, it is waiting
For a slip, for a fall, for my failing.

Under the boards of all our floors is a hollow space
Where we confide in what we hide in our shadows’
Deep blue eyes
That recognise us
Our secret sides and
Our trapdoor smiles.

See his box, concede, I’m in it
It’s all I’ve got, so paper thin
Salutate my loves, my limits
Something’s loose under my skin.

This is a simple salute to the folds in our shadows and the rustles in waiting dark nights. You never know when a fog will fall, a darkness will drop, or a day will snap in two. It’s not something that can be outran, or contained or pacified. So sometimes you have to sit and confide, and stare into its pools of eyes, dark and blue and wide. Sink or swim. Things get out or they get in.

Somebody is grafitting the walls down by the docks. The docks are deep, the docks are deep, the docks are deep to let the ships in and for… Somebody is writing “I’m not well Please talk” on the walls. See inside, inside and outside, is silence and noise. The noise and the silences of one into the silences and noise of the many as one. Whoever wrote it doesn’t even own it now, once it is on the walls.

Please talk, I’m not well enough to know how to say
But even if the words are mixed up they will stay
Hanging on to conversations, stations of the chain
Dangling on the edge of consciousness and its remains

Please talk I’m not well enough to begin the day
A million impulses hold me under their sway
Hanging on to loose connections, precious guessing games,
Their rules are deep shape shifting every time we play

I know I was born ready if only I could keep steady
Prop me up and push me on, we’ll go marching to cushy songs

Please talk I’m not well enough to express my fears,
And it seems impossible to change how this ship steers
Hanging on to definitions of the stuff I love
Why are we always somewhere else making some shit up?

Please talk I’m not well enough for another round
Let me lie here on this canvas losing pound for pound
Hanging on to normality see it all collapse
Ambivalence impending momentary lapse

I know I was born ready if only I could keep steady
Prop me up and push me on, we’ll go marching to cushy songs
To face into the wind inventing fables that might mend me gently
trace the lines that lead me here, harvest debt and borrowed ears.

Please talk I’m not well it’s just how these things work out
SO it goes and goes and ghosts who knock our lives about.

battleroad. song about dislocation and zerosum narratives. Or not.

Lyrics

On the battleroad, on the battleroad,
Whatever you were told, out on the battleroad.

You don’t fall, when you are dropped
Don’t know you’re moving, until the moving stops.
You’ve got your stories, your history, and your glue.
But can you stick it together, whatever’s coming through?

On the battleroad, on the battleroad,
Oh you can never fold, out on the battleroad.

Set it up, just to tear it down,
Strip it right back, to where you first belonged.
Your broken suitcase is floating in the waves-
Let the winners choose who they’re gonna save.

On the battleroad, on the battleroad,
Whatever you can hold, out on the battleroad.

Streets are paved with abandoned plans.
Midnight’s mute ghosts will come and take you by the hand
But you keep on moving, and you make no fuss,
They say we’re in this together: you’ve just gotta be one of us.

On the battleroad, on the battleroad,
Where no love is owed, out on the battleroad.

Where the word is sowed,
Where the weeds are sprayed
How will you know you’ve paid, all you owed, to the battleroad?

poor recording. Guitar is bleeding into the lyrics and I can't play it with subtlety that this kind of effort needs. Still, I haven't written much this year. Something's better than nothing?

Chords: D G for the chorus, C G for the verse.