Flesh
Shame
I had a dream about this mad girl last night. She was put into a mincer and churned up and all that was left was her eye floating on top......and it kept looking at me and sleepily half closing and rolling around and I thought who's going to help her......who's going to have some feelings for this poor girl......me? or was the girl me? or part of me.
We did things at Kruger Plein that we'd normally never dare do....and it was shocking because we didn't know what it meant....what were we now? Deeper and deeper.....when we wanted to come to the light. I suppose we had to go all the way down to be able to return. It took years. But then it always takes years for me to do anything.
I used to be an alcoholic. Well, I drank continuously anyway. I feel so sorry for my first wife because every romantic place we went to I was usually pissed on beer or cheap red wine.....and lay around in a daze while she tried to make the best of it. Awful. Awful. There are so many things that I've done that I'm deeply ashamed of. Black holes in my life, swallowing up the light and the good.
I could be anything if I wanted to ...if I dared
I don't mean like an astronaut or a doctor. That's too much work. I mean I can sometimes be rough....sometimes beautiful without being called a queer. No that's not what I mean at all. I meannnnn..........a different personality. I mean there's millions to choose from....not just be ONE THING all the time. That's not it either. One way of finding it. By finding everything that it's not.
Sunday night. More or less finished the first song in the Labyrinth Saga. (Click here for song)
Well they dragged you in chains
I see you nearly made it to the wire.
Another futile mutiny
you didn't want to sing in the choir
you can't defy her.
Well she fed my desire
said here's a little bone to chew
I twisted and I turned
I only got a peek a boo
No touching you.
Dark circus
dream on my baby dear
There's no escaping here.
Softly singing I love you darling
you're mommies baby boy.
There must be something you can take
something'sgonna break
you need to feel her fire.
As you beat about the bushes
with your spear in your hand
and you spy her,
you won't untie her.
Well I know I swear
there was something in the air
a little rendezvous.
Hanging out on street corners
trying to catch a glimpse
of you.
I'm missing you.
Dark Circus
boy versus girl
the hunt is on.
Dark feelings
lost meanings
and the road is long.
You were young and foolish
you took her for a ride to impress her.
You got a cold shoulder there
where you tried to caress her
you can't possess her.
Well I jumped upon my high horse
I did a little trick or two.
She sweated in the harness
Said "so this is waterloo....
I'm overdue"
Congrats on
your screaming souvenir
Oh Judas
dance for the puppeteer.
Softly singing I love you darling
you're mommies baby now.
I've just been reading "Angelique". This woman's a walking nightmare. Men dropping around her like flies. Every man she meets ends up either being burned at the stake or with his tongue hanging out on the gallows or with his belly slit open by someone's knife. All she touches turns to ruin. No wonder my mom was crazy about her. This woman single-handedly wiped out half the men in Paris. And done in such style.....such innocence.....no sign of the raging heart wreaking revenge on those who ravaged her. It seems as if fate itself stepped in and, unbeknownst to her, smote left and right to the core of a woman's dilemma............The weakness of the brute. How a man will walk to his doom for a woman's love..........the sight that mesmerises....the smile that stuns....
He sees it coming, but there is nothing he can do to save himself. If he is lucky enough to escape the first time........never fear, he will soon try again until she unmasks in terrible triumph and he is lost forever in the labyrinth of her dissatisfaction. Marry in haste....repent at leisure. This is the dreadful secret that every woman knows.......that every man's a fool.....and only he doesn't know it.....until it's too late.
BEWARE....BEWARE.....La Belle Dame Sans Merci has thee in thrall.
Oh what can ail thee
knight at arms
alone and palely loitering
when all the sedge has withered from the lake.....
....AND NO BIRDS SING.
pollution.....nuclear waste.........acid rain.
for
A Lover
Oh with your longing heart,
you'll be searching in her sorrow
for a pain that never ends.
If you go looking for
your life
in the titanic feats of men
achilles heel pressed to the board
your mind around the bend
ahead.
I never got justice. Don't you talk back was all I got........so I went out and killed birds.
I knew a boy...a big galumphing halfwit since he was hit by a bus mixing up strange potions in his room
and pouring a bit on my dad's front lawn with a triumphant smile as I watched the lawn turn brown before my very eyes. God knows what he had in that vial. He was always cursing his mother for calling him and injecting water and stuff into tame white rats to see how distorted they became. These he would also show me with pride. I was just silent as per usual.
His mother was a poor woman whose husband had a heart attack and she had to take him by bus to the hospital miles away and it took hours and then they wouldn't admit him because she'd forgotten to bring her blue cross card and she had to go all the way home to get it and all the way back on the bus and found him dead in the waiting room.
For the sake of the women's-libbers....let me qualify that the "SHE" I'm talking about is what a boy or mans vision of a woman is. A woman is what she is and closer to a man than he thinks
or she will admit. A woman to a man is either the goddess of love or the head of the Hydra.....and he oscillates between these two mythological creatures for most of his life, rarely noticing the real flesh and blood one.
So much has happened. The doctor says I don't have cancer but some of my lung is permanently damaged. Got an inhaler or puffer and it's a million times better. I also went to see a Kinesiologist
who got me back to 9 months and 17 days and what do I see. My mother trying to suffocate me.....then at the last minute she runs out the house. Suddenly my whole life makes sense. My recurring nightmare too.
(Two incidents contributed to it. The first was when we came back from a holiday in Durban by the sea.......and found the house burgled. Burglar bars unscrewed and twisted. They even took the mattresses and we were told not to touch anything because there might be FINGERPRINTS.
The next was when the Modderfontein dynamite factory blew up twenty miles away. My window pane bent in 5 inches........we were just outside the fifteen mile all-the-windows-smashed area.)
Anyway so to my nightmare. A Black hooded figure comes in through the window.....there's a huge explosion....my bed turns upside down and I suffocate underneath it on my pillow. After half an hour of hell on earth I manage by superhuman effort to move my leg the tiniest bit...and I'm out and awake and breathing again.
My other brother had asthma. I feel for the guy.
I'm only 6' 2" now!
Even if it wasn't true.....it's the implications that are astonishing. She was just like any other ordinary eighteen year old girl come to the big city from a very religious Afrikaans family out in the bleak dried up grasslands of the Orange Free State. Locked up all day long in a dark and dingy one and a half room semi-detached (In South Africa that means poor) flat next to the railway line under the shadow of the mine dumps. Maybe they were hoping to find a bit of gold.........sand is what they got........bitter bread for a romance-hungry-excited-by-the-bright-lights-it's-a-fairy-tale type of woman. My Dad was English raised in Natal........
I used to play on the mine-dumps with my bicycle. Pushing it up to the top and trying to ride down the avalanche. One of my friends did a bare belly whoopee dive down the side and we all went ouch shame afterwards. Once I found a crevice and walked in. After a while I could hardly see the sky above me it was so deep. I found a little bird there on the floor and she had a broken wing which she was dragging. I tried to catch her to take her out.........and I can't remember but I think she just ran off deeper into the crevice and it got too narrow for me to follow.
Perhaps after nine months of this baby needing constant attention and my dad being the taciturn type
she just one day flipped, as mothers do, and lost it. She must have felt terrible afterwards ( as mothers do) and then pampered me to death until the next time she.
Her second nervous breakdown was about eight years later roundabout the time of the cap gun incident .
That was the first and last time I saw my dad cry. On the corner of his double bed. He said she had gone to a rest home and he didn't think she was coming home again. It must have been touch and go.
O.k. I'm going to go and record the Bass track on the second song. It's called JUMP. About a girl who makes it big in the city....should be happy as a lark and then steps off the balcony of her penthouse suite....
.
" bye bye daddy...just one more line of the sweet."