Axolotl

Cautionary Tales

2023

You have my skin and my hazel eyes

and my confidence of posture

You walk the ground like it’s your bitch

like you’ve won your second Oscar

You wear your flesh like the national flag
and your voice like the song of state

Live the life that was built for you
by your dad’s drive to dominate

You, dear boy, are a snake with a serpent’s stutter
You, dear boy, are an axolotl. pale ground dweller
We walk on fields that are paved with your good intentions
We live in sin
Eternal juvenile dining out on this mess we’re in

You saw my skin and my hazel eyes
 and you made your first mistake
Approached me a casual confidant
 with a coloured joke to make
But I’m not your kin and I hate your kind
and your vacant lust for acclaim

So I met your gaze and I ate your pride

Left you cutting your mouth on my name

You, dear boy, are a snake with a serpent’s stutter
You, dear boy, are an axolotl. pale ground dweller
We walk on fields that are paved with your good intentions
We live in sin
Eternal juvenile dining out on this mess we’re in

So from pub to club and back again you waste all your unending nights

So when I’m swinging from the stars above
 you’ll be pinned under fluorescent lights
You wear your flesh like the stars & stripes 
and your voice like a wrecking ball

You see the world as a child’s toy
 and your cock like a conference call

You, dear boy, are a snake with a serpent’s stutter
You, dear boy, are an axolotl. pale ground dweller
We walk on fields that are paved with your good intentions
We live in sin
Eternal juvenile dining out on this mess we’re in

City Life

Cautionary Tales

2023

This city spreads like fungus, the centre of the world
Exultantly atop the sea, its clotted wings unfurled

Elementary virtues, like science & the law
Have been replaced with something based in mankind running raw 

I have the voice of five hundred years of colonial rule

It makes me so self-conscious, I’m always playing fool

Accent so untraceable I’m foreign when I’m home

The language of power is welded to the bone

Squandering
 chance after chance after chance 

Our empire is crumbling

There’s no place here for a man whose world is shrinking

It’s time to get outta town

I’m over in the corner with a mind like broken glass

Smearing vaseline on my third eye as you strut past

And so damn wise I plucked my eyes and had my mouth sewn shut

Stopped these endless visions, now I make moves from the gut
And sometimes in a momentary madness of the mind   

We hope that we’ll find others, but there’s none else of our kind

I hear something stirring out beyond the bounds of thought

Sharpening knives to take apart these systems that we’ve wrought

Squandering
 chance after chance after chance 

Our empire is crumbling

There’s no place here for a man whose world is shrinking

It’s time to get outta town

Well I was raised in love

Believing I’m the one

I’m not
So I’ve cauterised my tongue
I was raised with hope

Believing in the project

but it’s dead
So I’m feeling fucking abject

I wanna tear a hole right through reality and climb

Into a place remains in grace, where nothing’s in decline

You asked me once “what are you doing with this precious life?”

My answer: “trying to balance on the sharp side of a knife”

Squandering
 chance after chance after chance 

Our empire is crumbling

There’s no place here for a man whose world is shrinking

It’s time to get outta town

My mind is stuck within
A fragile shell of bone & skin
An instrument of God
That fucker with his mirthless grin

I fear we’re stuck going in circles
Going ‘round ‘round ‘round 

In Every Dream Home a Heartache

Roxy Music / Bryan Ferry

2023

In every dream home a heartache
And every step I take
Takes me further from heaven
Is there a heaven? 
I'd like to think so
Standards of living
They're rising daily
But home oh sweet home
It's only a saying
From bell push to faucet
In smart town apartment
The cottage is pretty
The main house a palace
Penthouse perfection
But what goes on there?
What to do there?
Better pray there

Open plan living
Bungalow ranch style
All of it's comforts
Seem so essential
I bought you mail order
My plain wrapper baby
Your skin is like vinyl
The perfect companion
You float my new pool
De luxe and delightful
Inflatable doll
My role is to serve you
Disposable darling
Can't throw you away now
Immortal and life size
My breath is inside you
I'll dress you up daily
And keep you till death sighs

Inflatable doll
Lover ungrateful
I blew up your body
But you blew my mind

Oh those heartaches
Dream home heartaches

A hubristic Coda to a masterpiece

So let’s seize this moment and vow never to be cruel
To always stick together, and together see the world
well you so giving
and me so content
Sitting the sun drinking daiquiris
so open to the world
And so I said to you
I said to you 
I said
It’s time to move down to Patagonia
we can rent a bed
Or rent an island, make like lizards in the sun
Bribe the local politicians, mouth effronteries at nuns
And strut down the street in a cool linen suit
With you on my arm, strangers giving looks

You’ll see that I’m open, that I’m giving and I’m kind

With you there sitting by my right hand
my right hand side

The Bone Shore

Cautionary Tales

2020

This unbroken chain pulls me down to where the sirens be
Where existence is shallow and long
Beneath these wine-dark seas they’re so hot to sing me these
Songs of elisions, omissions and wrongs
In forests of weeds my body is drifting
Dressed all in rags with cadaverous grace
Seawater gurgling in my lower intestines
Empty expression on my second-hand face

The sirens all sing of a more perfect union
‘tween monkey and Pisces, or man and his God
They’re working endlessly to overthrow this
Insatiable Triton, a deified patriarch
They’ve studied their Marx, and to Marx they still cleave
Well I sing to them, and they back to me

But my voice is the voice of a gull

I’m just one drop from the ocean
And one drop back again
I’m just one grain of the black sands
Just one grain in the hand
Boyhood ambition
Such a painful condition
A teaspoon of salt in the bloodstream
So make your incisions
To be blind begets visions
Under ether you will never dream

Living in the firing line
I’ve become aware that my
Imminent death is a matter of note
And they’ll say that I married for love and for sex
And they’ll say that my name was too long and too English
The things I believe will be lost to the currents
My visceral fears will seem placid & tame
My life will be subject to endless analysis
Gaggles of critics, writing histories of fame

The sirens sing songs of a new revolution
It’s coming, it’s coming, it’s practically here
There’s nothing for no-one, and no-one left needing
These fifth column naiads are oh so contemptuous
They’re older and colder and bolder than I
They bring me fine tea, and tell me I’m too bourgeoisie

I’m just one drop from the ocean
An elemental force
I’m just one stone from the black shores
A tiny little god
When I was down in that kingdom
Can you believe what I saw?
Well the sirens they were singing
But it was such a fucking bore

Hermitage is the new plan for living
And this hermit’s skull is
A perfect receiver
For all these transmissions
That are best left unbroadcast
And all of these feelings
That are best left unspoken
Well I crossed the ocean from a beautiful nowhere
With black-sanded shores and high suicide rates
The mermaids they sing of such beautiful futures
But is there anyone
In the audience
Who has lived in vain?

Women

Cautionary Tales

2023

Athena took a liking to a minor island prince

Well she played him like a dulcimer

Marked his face with fingerprints
Smeared his life across the sea with that godly disregard

Fought his case right to her uncle’s face

But left his mind and body scarred
Dido died disordered on a pyre that Carthage grew

Torn between a Queen’s responsibility and you
Wandering prince, made your escape towards a city yet unearned

Leaving your sword embedded in that woman that you’d spurned


Look at these, my angels fair

Reading books with unwashed hair

Living out their bodies’ lives

They’ll live until the end of time

Well Sappho passed the Bechdel test with songs of love & lust

Her life became a symbol of escape from manhood’s thrust
Marie Curie won a prize in radiographic work

She died in France, her blood askance
 with a hint of sapphic dirt
Ada Lovelace, British countess
, sang to her machines

Upon her death her work eclipsed her father’s opium dreams
Ada Palmer’s still alive. she’s winning great acclaim
With consensus-based legality
 and gender-fucking games

I’m a junkie to his fixer
I’m a painter to Rembrandt

I’m a fly on a carcass

I’m a zealot on a rant

I’m a moth to a candle

I’m the fungus on an ant

I’m a wasp to a spider

I’m a thief’s forgotten cant
Can I come a little closer?
Can I come a little closer?
Can I come a little closer?
And closer still?

Look at these, my angels fair

Reading books with unwashed hair

Living out their bodies’ lives

They’ll live until the end of time
One for mercy
One for God

One that hearth and home forgot

One that’s living no man’s life

And one I hope to make my wife

St Hildegard earned great regard, a prophet in her time
Wrote the Lingua Ignota, the sibyl of the Rhine
St Joan of Arc, she made her mark. was killed, then canonised

For the Dauphin’s claim of immortal fame
 but she’s the one now lionised
And Patti Smith on the cover of Easter

Well she brought me to my knees

We’re lucky babe, we’re doing fine to live through times like these
Annie Clark took us all apart, the greatest in her time

Walked that line between idolic art and the secrets, swamp & grime

She’s an angel of compassion

She’s a healer of the soul

She’s savage and she’s brilliant

And she swallows chaos whole
She’s bitingly reductive

Unconstricted by her role

Has a missionary zeal

And that feline self-control
Can I come a little closer?
Can I come a little closer?
Can I come a little closer?
And closer still?

Look at these, my angels fair

Reading books with unwashed hair

Living out their bodies’ lives

They’ll live until the end of time
One for mercy
One for God

One that hearth and home forgot

One that’s living no man’s life

And one I hope to make my wife

No Funeral Blues

Cautionary Tales

2023

In Memory of Eric Freedman

It’s hard to miss you, but then I hardly saw you

Can’t say I didn’t see this coming all those years ago 

Your wicked smile, it flashed across our joyous wildfire nights

And your body was a fulcrum between your darkness and your light
So I spread the sparks we struck across the heavens
as new stars

In honour of long nights we spent slumming in local bars 

And all around the world others sing my same sad song

An unexpected absence and nothing to hold on


So silence the pianos
and muffle all the drums

There can be no answers
no matter how corrupt our world becomes

I loved you, and you loved me right back in kind

That needle-ravaged body bore an incandescent mind

You were the king of sound, with an ever-loving heart

No matter how the world conspired to keep the two of us apart

I lose myself sometimes in anger at the men who did this to you

But there’s nothing to be gained from that; 
no way to see the damn thing through
I dream you’re still ahead of me and on the day that I arrive

You’ll be smoking with the archangels having slipped St Peter a five


So silence the pianos
and muffle all the drums

There can be no coffin
nowhere from which to watch the mourners come

You died in a time with no funerals

No memorials

No speeches

No songs

You died in a time with no human contact

No laughter

No comfort

No joy

We’re all alone stuck singing these no funeral blues

It’s morning now 
and the light is getting rather warm
I can hear the bees amongst this multiplicity of forms

Ferns grow under canopy, and worms glow in the banks

I do not lack for conversation 
for that I give my thanks

And though my skin is cracking and my hands are growing worn

Life is still worth living
There’ll be time enough to mourn

Falling

Cautionary Tales

2023

Later on you drove us home
Took me to my father’s house 
Breathing in the dust they left behind
You were the first of my friends to die
Lately I’ve been feeling old
My bones and body ache
This is not what we bargained for
Our generation, will they set us free?

I still miss you
I think I’m drowning in 
Love for all these hopeless causes
I still love you
We have become beasts
Our hearts inflamed by endless dream
It’s all for love
Of pointless things
We don’t know nothing of what the future brings
It’s all for joy
At cutting these strings 
The past is receding
The present drags me from

 Moment to moment
I’m never sure just how far I’ve come
All things considered
I wouldn’t trade lives with anyone
In Aramoana
You tore apart my ambitions, babe
You sang of fire
And to that fire they fed your remains
In all my living
Unanswered question gather ‘round
I think I’m falling
How many years till I hit the ground?

Life is very long

Weightlessly the years float by
My face has never shown my age
So I manage all the damage done
Spider lines drawn by the southern sun
Untimely death’s a leaden thing
My mind is filled with fear 
I wonder what you’d make of me
Transformation, darling, sets us free

I still miss you
I think I’m drowning in 
Love for all these hopeless causes
I still love you
We have become beasts
Our hearts inflamed by endless dream
It’s all for love
Of pointless things
We don’t know nothing of what the future brings
It’s all for joy
At cutting these strings 
The past is receding
The present drags me from

Moment to moment
I’m never sure just how far I’ve come
But weighing the balance
I wouldn’t trade lives with anyone
In struggle and sorrow
uncertainties tend to gather ‘round  
I think I’m falling
How many years must we stand with upturned mouths
and pray for the rain?

Soma

Cautionary Tales

2023

This year I found a lover

but now she’s going away

And then I found a job
but that job doesn’t pay

So though I have a mission
I don’t have the time

And though I found a purpose

I don’t have the means

And every day I hope that something can be different

For those ordinary men
 living their ordinary lives

And every day I wake in peace and tell myself that

Nothing matters anymore

No nothing matters anymore

I’m stretched so thin that you can 
pluck me like a string

I’ve grown so tightly wound 
I make the tiniest of sounds

I wake & fret & sleep & wake again to find myself

Pushing another thread

Climbing the walls around my head

I spend my days holding onto these concrete things

That can be listed
or measured
 and so managed

I long to swim along the muddy ocean floor

Under leviathans with jagged maws

Or as a pair of ragged claws

Winter to winter

And winter back again once more

I haven’t seen a sunny day in years

So as the days turns into months 

And then those months turn into years

I haven’t seen a damn thing changing

And though I’m only human x3
Though I’m human I’m still akin to God