While The Ghosts Are Putting Make-up On Their Deathmasks In The Green Room
While the ghosts are putting make-up on their death masks in the green room
and looking for their false eyelashes like centipedes on the floor,
I'm out on stage apologizing for a power outage of the stars
that shouldn't be blamed on the windmills everybody's tilting at.
And even Mother Theresa is lining up with the mermaids
on the deck of the latest shipwreck to see if she can get a bunk for the night
without any bugs or bedsores. Crackhead, hillbilly, hippie rednecks
are pouring booze over the amps of the band, and the arsonist in the corner
who hasn't said a thing all night a lip reader could understand
is trying to short out his nerves to start a fire in the walls.
The underground circus is back in town like Cirque du Soleil in eclipse,
and as far as I can see, there are a lot of fire hydrants around
but no sacred clowns, and the audience is perched on a public trapeze
under a tent of starmaps that have never seen the Pleiades.
If you just got here, Edgar Allen Poe's already had it out with the raven,
but nobody cares much, since it should have happened a long time ago,
and besides, Nevermore's not much of a door to get out of
in case of a fire. Go ask the thief who left the moon in the window
and my reflection in the mirror when everything else disappeared.
He'll tell you about the cat burglar who fell off the seventh floor
and lived to go on tour with the tale when she got crazy enough
to be wise, and put on a golden parachute that was the same size as her skin.
Have you seen Rasputin? I'm looking for my bleeding heart,
and the last time I heard of him he was in a bag in a river
with a snake that was using a rooster as a fire to keep warm
while the toxins and the bullets took effect, though all the haemophiliacs
and worried assassins said when they pulled him out, he still wasn't dead.
Hey, you've got to give a man credit for not dying
when he was too innocent to float like a waterlily or an ice-berg
in a trial by ordeal that's more Germanic than Slavic
though he should have been more subtle in his approach
to a courtful of jesters and gleemen who hate
the sound of anyone's laughter in their midst but the king's and their own.
And even the high priest of the Wizard of Oz
with his police megaphone and his taser baton agrees
you can't learn the protocols of mythic inflation
unless you're on your knees. Though I suspect
there's a lot less behind that than at first glance appears
as Cygnus swan-dives sidereally into a pool the size of a tear
without a safety net of shattered mirrors in the land of lakes
to break its Icarian descent into the shallow end of the fools
who are watching with their third eyes closed,
and lens caps on their telescopes like the blindfolds of a firing squad
that don't look much like the hoods of hunting falcons
with a bola of bells around their legs,
and the crescents of the moon for a trinity of talons.
But by the end of the act, the ghost of Lady Nightshade comes forth
like a spiritual toxologist with a spiritual arrowhead in her hands
to make a Clovis point of flint-knapped obsidian as clearly as she can
by plunging it through everyone's heart like Jonestown
that's just run out of black cool aid to bring
everything down to ground zero again as the roof blows off
in an unexpected cyclone, and we're all left lying here
caught dead in our tracks like telescopes
and the standing targets of easels in the doe-glare
of the oncoming headlights of vehicles into roadkill
as if there were no more ripples or wavelengths in the rain
or tree rings anywhere in the petrified heartwood of the pain.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Related quotes
Lady Nightshade's Suicide Wasn't Vain Enough
Lady Nightshade’s suicide wasn’t vain enough.
She insisted on dying for the world.
She finally stepped through the black door.
She took all that splendour of mind and flesh
and instead of going supernova to make a statement
let it shrink down into
the single snowflake of a white dwarf
in a spring thaw.
She died as unobtrusively as a wild flower perishes.
Lady Nightshade died like a whisper in a hurricane of razorblades
a candle flame
a toy in the corner
that knows when it’s time to let the child go.
She knew her greatest claim to fame
was perpetual silence.
There are some eyes so clear and radiant
the light’s too shy to enter.
There are some mirrors
that have to turn their backs on you
to show you what you’re looking at.
Lady Nightshade died like a black mass at the eclipse of a water lily
and then blew out the flames
on a skeletal replica
of the extinct candelabra
she made of her fossil remains.
It was hard to keep up with the half-life of some of her lies
but she could tell time radioactively
like numbers on a watch that glow in the dark
while the rest of us had to rely on a water clock.
She could see things coming
from the asteroid’s point of view
and when you heard her speak
of what she thought it was you should seek
among all those invisible things
we make visible through our lives
even if you only had a rag of blood
snagged on a thorn of what’s left of a heart in your body
she made a deep and lasting impact.
You looked at her
and you knew the time of night
and the weather.
In her nuclear winter
you were either a species of delusion
that went extinct
or you changed the way she did
and she was a legend among chameleons.
She was a rainbow’s worst nightmare.
With her
you weren’t deep enough into anything
until you’d dug your own grave.
She could hold your spirit up to your face
like a mirror one moment
and in the next
tear it off like a bandage on a deep wound
as if she were unmasking a new scar on the dark side of the moon.
She could make you smile like a face-painted clown
who just had his smile widened
from cheek to cheek
by a scalpel.
She was the daughter of intensity
but god help the snake
who tried to ride the dragon
by hanging on with its fangs
as if those were any kind of match
for her crescents and claws.
She could weld a forked tongue
back into a spear head
and bury it like the Clovis point of a viper
deep in the deserts of Arizona
where it would take twelve thousand years
for someone to find it
like a flint knapped skull with lockjaw.
With her it was ok to be the universe
as long as she were its physical laws
and they were at all times and everywhere
applicable and true.
And god what a body.
You took one look at her
and you knew already
you’d been sexually bruised.
She was living proof
that on the Day of Creation
when God made woman
he had a muse
and the rest of us were plagiarized
from an overdue Texas textbook
that denied evolution
was creatively collaborative and true.
The immutable faithful still profaning existence
where everything is the genome of the many
and all are the chosen few.
But Lady Nightshade was more amused by
than convinced of her own beauty.
She was too intelligent
not to use it as an index
of male cupidity
twisting their inflated multiverse
like birthday balloons in hyperspace
into her favourite kind of lapdog
as Leonard Cohen sang in the background
no man ever got a woman back
by begging on his knees.
She was the kind of hunger
that could teach a rude man to say please
and a wiser one
who’s been seasoned by the sea
under full sail
like an orchard in a storm
thank-you.
She could roll men’s skulls like dice
that always came up snake-eyes
because she could see how clearly
they were estranged from their own reflections
like telescopes that can see everything but themselves
bring the far near
shorten the mile
be the last day of the thirteenth month
in a leaping light year
that stays one step ahead of itself
like a thief of the moon
coming in through the back door
of someone else’s homelessness.
She loved to give performance poetry readings
where she’d scream at the featured guests
molesting the microphone with their monogamous poems
like the accused at the accuser
like an oracular snake pit from the audience
or a banshee at the window
Do you know how many muses
you blind sleepwalkers
have turned into social workers?
And in the barefoot silence that ensued
no one dropped the other shoe
and you just knew
those on stage
felt like the cutting edge of a new ice age
that would be the crib-death of inspiration
and thousands of baby mammoths
that would be clutched by dozy glaciers
like stuffed teddy-bears for security and warmth
for the next twenty-five thousand years
of black ice a mile high
trying to transcend itself
like a recurring nightmare.
Lady Nightshade wasn’t the kind of revolutionary
that showed her face to the world
like a mask turned inside out.
She never let her certainty get in the way of her doubt.
I remember watching her one night
after we’d made love
look out from the fourteenth floor
of the Hotel des Gouverneurs
at St. Denys Boulevard
lit up like a Nazca landing strip
in the middle of the starscape
that bloomed like Montreal.
She was naked.
She was vulnerable.
But I could see a bridge in the far distance
on her right shoulder
like a threshold that was all
exit and entrance
at the extreme ends of things
always at right angles to the direction of the flow.
It arched over the river
like the Egyptian sky goddess Nut
her body night-blue with white stars
that lined the bridge like streetlamps
as fragile and delicate in the aerial atmospherics
as the eyelashes of nocturnal humming birds.
And I saw right then and there
how vastly she longed for her ghost
to ready her for death
like a lover from another lifetime
when suffering wasn’t
the only natural renewable resource
you could rely on to make a living.
A wounded hawk never asks for pity
and she didn’t ask for mine.
She was the key
that left everything open
and for awhile
we were inseparably alone
because I was the lock
that couldn’t keep anything in.
She jumped from her bridge
into the lifeboat of a coffin
and left a farewell on the mirror
written by a bleeding snail of scarlet lipstick.
I don’t know what star she was following
but back here on earth
there’s a black hole that eats its own shadow
and chandeliers of firelies
that keep putting themselves out in their tears.
Lady Nightshade never cheated her solitude
by buffing it with love.
Lady Nightshade played solitaire
with a Tarot pack of mirrors.
She saw what turned up.
Lady Nightshade followed the Queen of Cups to the block.
She said a few words
that ransomed her life with a candle.
She blew it out.
She swanned like a summer constellation
on the smoke of a distant fire.
She drowned her silver sword in the star stream
like a barrette she took out of her hair
to let it blow away like the fragrance
of something beautiful hidden somewhere
like a secret that was meant to be kept.
Lady Nightshade bloomed like a bruise.
A blue rose.
A new moon.
Dark.
Unknown.
And cherished.
And when she perished
only strangers could have guessed why I wept.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Cause of Enmity between Snake and Man
Snake, the first owner of fire.
Dog, the robber of fire.
Man the last owner of fire.
The snake gave birth first to fire.
Thus fire, the first born of snake.
Thus snake, only owner of fire long ago.
One cold evening
The man dying of coldness
The dog seen it master dying of coldness
It went to snake house and begged
The snake, the mother of fire to let
It tail get warm of fire
The snake cordially welcomed the dog
The dog twisted it tail on fire
The tail caught the fire
The dog jumped over the snake in door
Ran quickly to it master, the man
The man took the grass and wood
And lit up the fire
The fire lit up in man’s house
And it extinguished in snake’s house
The snake come to get fire back
But the man attack the snake
The hostility between man and snake
Began then
poem by David Aoloch Bion
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Fire On The Mountain
Long distance runner, what you standin there for?
Get up, get out, get out of the door
Your playin cold music on the barroom floor
Drowned in your laughter and dead to the core.
Theres a dragon with matches thats loose on the town
Takes a whole pail of water just to cool him down.
Fire! fire on the mountain!
Almost ablaze still you dont feel the heat
It takes all you got just to stay on the beat.
You say its a livin, we all gotta eat
But youre here alone, theres no one to compete.
If mercys a busness, I wish it for you
More than just ashes when your dreams come true.
Fire! fire on the mountain!
Long distance runner, what you holdin out for?
Caught in slow motion in a dash for the door.
The flame from your stage has now spread to the floor
You gave all you had. why you wanna give more?
The more that you give, the more it will take
To the thin line beyond which you really cant fake.
Fire! fire on the mountain!
song performed by by Grateful Dead
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The Brighter The Light, The Deeper The Shadow
for Rebekah Garland
The brighter the light, the deeper the shadow.
Shine. And anyone who can see will follow.
Just make sure the stars are real and not tinfoil.
You don't need to know where you're going
to be a good guide when you yourself are the path you're on.
Shine. You're the blue orchid in the Pleiades.
You're the firefly in the skull that kicked in
like a bioluminescent emergency light
when the dead woke up to discover they had no eyes.
You're the last candle dancing to the pulse of the dragon's heart.
You have suffered and lost. Suffered and won.
Suffered and healed like wounded water on the moon.
Shine like a fountainmouth. Shine like a watershed
that can feel the galaxies swimming through it like starfish
whirling like Sufis at the crossroads of a black hole
like the navel of the wheeling world with the singularity
of a hidden jewel in it like the third eye of a lump of coal
shining out like a diamond of the first magnitude.
You can do cartwheels across the sky
as if your legs and arms were spokes.
You can listen for a voice in the abyss of time and silence
until your ears turn into radio telescopes
turning like calla lilies on a jinxed prayer wheel
looking for signs of extraterrestrial rural life
like pendulous Zen pagodas hanging like bird feeders
on the errant limb of a locust tree, waiting for birds.
Shine like a sword of fire outside the gates of your re-entry
from a long return journey of the smokey dove
that wasn't sacrificed, but volunteered
to go see what happened to the crow that was sent out first
to witch for land with an olive branch of lightning in its beak
as a sign of the truce we seek with the rain,
we seek through our tears, we seek like the new moon
wholly reflected in every plinth of our shattered mirrors
of what appeared to be real, until, like hungry ghosts
we tried to grasp it and it slipped through our fingers
like an hourglass full of stars, a rosary of Canada geese,
a slaver's neckchain made of gold like a Celtic torgue.
Shine. I know there's a genie of blue hydrogen in your lamp
and you don't need a nightwatchman to ignite it every night,
though I expect you'd meet up later at a seance,
like the creative medium of a spiritual adept at sensual silence.
But when you do, you fire up hell like a school furnace
as easily as you illuminate paradise with a poppy and a sunflower.
Shine. This is your hour. When it's darkest and it matters the most.
Be a lighthouse off your own shipwrecked coast.
Be the many-petalled matchbook of a flower that blooms in fire
once every seven thousand years, and when the wind
doesn't feed it anything but the milk and bread of ghosts,
I know you've got the ferocious courage
not to blow it out just because you can. Shine
like a wavelength ploughing the dead seas of the moon
like a garden it intends to plant in its wake
that will keep on expanding like the growing edge
of tree rings emanating like cambium from the heartwood
of a cosmic tree that never stops bearing fruit
even when it feels like a Pre-Cambrian tree in a petrified forest
under the Arctic ice of a new polarized ice age.
Don't hide in the weeds and the shadows
of the star you were meant to be at this zenith
of your ascendency whether you're peaking or at nadir.
Shine. And let me see if I can recognize by one star alone
what constellation you're shapeshifting into
like a starmap with flightpaths and insights of her own
through the eye of the hurricane
in the crowns of the black walnut trees
where the nightbirds are waiting as autumn's coming on
for you to show them how to make their own way home.
Be a lamp in the arms of your own journey.
Just as the moon that's apprenticed like a sorceress
to all the phases of your beautiful, crazy wisdom is.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Cat People
See these eyes so green
I can stare for a thousand years
Colder than the moon
Feel my blood enraged
It's just the fear of losing you
Don't you know my name
Well, you been so long
And i've been putting out fire
With gasoline
See these eyes so red
Red like jungle burning bright
Those who feel me near
Pull the blinds and change their minds
It's been so long
Still this pulsing night
A plague i call a heartbeat
Just be still with me
But it wouldn't believe what i've been thru
You've been so long
Well it's been so long
And i've been putting out the fire with gasoline
Putting out the fire
With gasoline
See these tears so blue
An ageless heart that can never mend
Tears can never dry
A judgement made can never bend
See these eyes so green
I can stare for a thousand years
Just be still with me
You wouldn't believe what i've been thru
Well you've been so long
It's been so long
And i've been putting out fire with gasoline
Putting out fire with gasoline
Putting out fire
We've been putting out fire
Well it's been so long so long so long
Yes it's been so long so long so long
I've been putting out fire
Been so long so long so long
And putting out fire
Been so long so long so long
Yeah yeah putting out fire
Been so long so long so long
Been putting out fire
Been so long so long so long
Yeah putting out fire
Been so long so long so long
Putting out fire
Been so long so long so long
It's been so long
Been so long so long so long
It's been so long
Been so long so long so long
It's been so long
Been so long so long so long
I've been putting out fire
Been so long so long so long
song performed by by David Bowie
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The Lament Of The Last Train Whistle
The lament of the last train whistle
has disappeared into the distance
mournfully looking for its lost child.
October night in the woods
around an old fire pit of prophetic skulls
blowing ghosts of smoke in my face
that bring me to tears, a neolithic calendar
of all the old and new moons that have passed.
So many, so much, that used to matter
doesn't anymore. Dream figures
that shed their skins like the longer wavelengths
of watersnakes in an infra-red mindscape
of serpent fire dying like the sun
that can tell the hour by the taste of its ashes.
I throw more well-dried thresholds on the fire
like branches that used to be green with the tears
of sweeter departures and arrivals over the years.
All the light's jumped from orbitals
of the tree rings that sag like bags
under the eyes knotted like islands
in the heartwood of their xylem and phloem.
Here where the river parts like long hair
on the skull of a stone, I sit like a demon
in a sacred place, clarified, alert, and alone
as any nocturnal animal in the woods.
The chalkdust of my bones trying
to connect the stars to their constellations
snagged in the trees like the rags of spiderwebs
on the blackboard of a starmap as wide as the sky
and deep as the subconscious of the Burgess Shale.
It's not a betrayal to let go of your faith
when you had none in the first place
and you don't need a parachute on the edge of space
to plunge from paradise, or a weather balloon
of a bad Christian poet to shepherd Dante
like a moon out of hell. Be yourself,
especially when nobody's watching
except that same drone in the sky
that occasionally flashes a flake of silver off
its stone cold third eye to flint your awareness
that it's still there in the cosmic background
like a witness to your dreams and schemes
for a luxuriously appointed life of enlightenment.
Be yourself. The direct copulative imperative
that has supplanted the light as the first word
out of the mouth of creation. Be yourself.
And then let there be light by the side of a good fire
to let you see who that is as acutely
as you can see in the dark who that is not.
The migration of the Canada geese might seem
a broken rosary of new moons calling out
the names of God to you, and one unknown,
or silhouetted against the moon they might
suggest the afterbirth attached to a cut umbilical cord
and your heart might feel reborn somewhere
in the autumn of your life, a child of the fire,
a flower in the full bloom of its solitude
dancing with its own mercurial apparition
on the waters of life in the mindstream
always out of season enough to lag behind
so it can tell the time by the widening gaps in its passage
as it's waiting for the night to catch up to its own shining
like a thief of fire unchained from the rock
that broke the glass window of its transfixed seeing
with a meteor in the hands of an enlightened delinquent.
Or you might read the falling leaves as occult lifelines
on a Tarot deck of overlapping lifespans
like the scales of a dragon playing solitaire
beside the small inferno of a signal fire to the stars,
to let them know you're coming faster
than the time it takes for a thought to make it
all the way to death and back to birth again
as if you were pinging your emotions
like stray wavelengths from the oceans of your awareness
off the horns of the moon the way
you used to skip rocks out over the sea as a boy
to see how long they would keep on going
like a waterclock of stone before they sank
like the flying fish of the hard, cold facts of life back into
the numinous depths of your collective unknowing
where the stars aren't fixed to anything that isn't
flowing along with them like the wind on the mindstream
or a small fire catching its breath in the silence and the solitude
of so much radiance, before it's on its way again for good.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Rockets Tail
That november night, looking up into the sky,
You said,
Hey, wish that was me up there--
Its the biggest rocket I could find,
And its holding the night in its arms
If only for a moment.
I cant see the look in its eyes,
But Im sure it must be laughing.
But it seemed to me the saddest thing Id ever seen,
And I thought you were crazy, wishing such a thing.
I saw only a stick on fire,
Alone on its journey
Home to the quickening ground,
With no one there to catch it.
I put on my pointed hat
And my black and silver suit,
And I check my gunpowder pack
And I strap the stick on my back.
And, dressed as a rocket on waterloo bridge--
Nobody seems to see me.
Then, with the fuse in my hand,
And now shooting into the night
And still as a rocket,
I land in the river.
Was it me said you were crazy?
I put on my cloudiest suit,
Size 5 lightning boots, too.
cause I am a rocket
On fire.
Look at me go, with my tail on fire,
With my tail on fire,
On fire.
Hey, look at me go, look at me...
song performed by by Kate Bush
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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My Heart Said Yes To Everything My Mind Denied
My heart said yes to everything my mind denied.
Certain women, poetry, doorways, cosmic risks,
a few back country roads that knew enough not
to ask me where I was going that late at night.
My absurd familiarity with sacred clowns
and this ghost dance of stars I see in their eyes
whenever one of them makes me cry in remembrance
of some old rag of laughter that ran before the bulls
like a rodeo clown in a whiskey barrel of fermented sorrows.
I said yes to exile. I said yes to my homelessness.
I said yes to the reflection of the kid
in the broken window of the burning orphanage
he'd just pecked his way out of like the shell of a phoenix.
I said yes to the abyss, to nothing, to emptiness
to the purr of the tides of sand in a desert
combing out the manes of lion-fire
that bloom like spiritual ferocities on the wind.
And I said yes to the rocks on the mountainside
who repeated what my secret teachers had said.
If you're still clinging to one placard of your freedom
you still haven't truly let go. And I said yes
and jumped like a snake at cruising altitude
without a parachute into a sudden enlargement of everything
and said yes to the dragon of that transformation
as it took to the wing like a fire in a furnace.
Yes to the altars when it was time to sacrifice the hero
to the unattainable he surrendered in the name of.
Yes to the dark niches of love
when the candles have gone blind
so much like eye-sockets in a skull beside a wishing well.
Yes was a way of sharing what no
had a tendency of hoarding for a day that never came.
Yes is doing it for everyone. No
does it for no one and can't even make it on its own.
There's something fundamentally revolutionary
and heretical about yes that burns in cleaner fire
than the dirty holy water no washes its hands in
to rid itself of the matter once and for all.
No takes account of every injury like a mandarin
standing off in the shadows of a rain dance of willows
to see who prefers the moonrise to the lightning.
Yes hasn't even figured out it's wounded yet.
Yes is the sacred syllable that all others words aspire to.
Yes opens more eyes than there are stars to look at.
More flowers and doors and hearts to the mystery
than there are keys in the spirit's lost and found
outside the gateless gates to paradise on earth
where no throws its crutches down as things
of no use anymore, and yes, the seed
that everything shape shifts out of
plants them all over the barren mountain side
like rootless trees with a path and a voice of their own
such that every time the lightning strikes another one down,
they say yes, and dropp another pine cone
on the fire that will give birth to them
like an encyclopedic fortune-cookie
whose cup runneth over with assent.
And, yes, even as the night approaches me
like an animal it no longer has to be wary of,
as the shadows of the trees lengthen into rivers
that disappear into the oceanic deltas of the night
like the leafless boughs of the trees of life
slendering into the sky like smoke from a sacred fire.
And, yes, to the crazy wisdom of this life I'm dreaming
I'm living on behalf of someone else
wholly inconceivable to me, not shallow, not deep,
neither near nor far. Not the intimate familiar
of fireflies, nor yet a perfect stranger to the stars.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Sometimes The Clarity Comes Too Late
Sometimes the clarity comes too late
to realize there was never
any need for forgiveness
and nothing to expiate
about the way we made our gracious farewells
into works of art
that would go on hurting forever.
We had a genius back then
for making death seem more beautiful than it is
because we lived on the edge of things
and not their surfaces
and o if we'd only felt all those things
that made us weep at the end
dying in doorways that were more cruel
than any threshold we had to cross to stand there.
If only we could have felt those immensities of good-bye
from the very beginning
what reason would we have had to cry like candles
when the wine turned back into water
and the roses wiped their lipstick off on their leaves?
One goes out.
One goes in.
Because severance
no less than the dance
takes two to make a difference
and as the years go by
the silver flakes off the memory of the mirror
and you can see clear through to the other side
experience is just another log
you throw on the stars
to keep yourself warm on a cold October night
by a small fire out in the open
where it's easier to sublimate
the intensities of fate
by opening the cages you keep them in
and burning your loveletters
like the flightfeathers of half-forgotten songs
to spread their wings in the flames
and give them the freedom to rise higher
than the nest of ashes they were born in.
History isn't the muse
the immeasurable mystery is
and if you don't learn to let things go
you'll never know
how to live lyrically alone in the wild
unbounded by your solitude
by the side of a river whose flowers are dying.
The green bough hisses and blisters in the fire
but the cracks in the heartwood
burn far into the night
and give off way more heat in the autumn
than the pre-emptive lightning strikes of spring.
It's a rite of passage as old as migrating geese
mournfully bearing souls south
whose bones have turned to dust
to take all my prophetic skulls like moon rocks
out of the house of the dead
and arranging them into the ring of a firepit
stand in the middle like the eternal flame
of an unrepentant heretic
to rekindle the dance
even among the skeletal shadows
of a persecuted romance.
Even in sorrow.
Even in the silence
of the great distances
that add their aerial perspective to time.
Not to call ghosts back to a seance
as if they could tell me anymore about death
than I've already lived through
but every year at the second full moon in October
after the harvest is in
and the scarecrow has come down off his cross
and left it to the ravens of nevermore as a church
I lay a blue violin on a funeral pyre.
I stretch my heart out like a skin on a drum.
Dressed in the plumage of solar flares
I enter a trance of firebirds
that have long since disappeared back into the sun
and like Icarus in eclipse
or the last grasshopper
who didn't take the advice of the ants
to drag the leaves and wings of things
piecemeal into a shelter
to prepare for deeper separations yet to come.
I take my chances by the hand out here in the open
and I dance.
I dance with heresy.
I dance with the angels and the demons
that were martyred in the name
of what is unforgiveable about my human nature
and yet more sacred than the rain I dance for
to put the war I dance for out.
I dance with whole asylums of noetic visionaries
who went insane
trying to explain me to myself
like the origins of life on another planet.
And I dance again to the music of the women I've loved
whether in pain or bliss
whether I was hung by the tail
like a plague rat over the abyss
of my cannibalized emotions
like a famished snakepit
or I fell sidereally under the spell
of the fragrance of summer stars in their hair
I dance not as if it were all worth it in the end
but something inestimable to celebrate
that gives the chartered undertakers pause
about what they do for a living
when they see how a poet can dance
to the picture-music of the crazy wisdom
that sings the dead up out of the earth to their feet
without looking down from the mountaintops
or back at the valleys behind
to take the measure of their heart
to see if it's empty or full.
I let the new moon
feel the old moon's arms around it again
like the bright vacancy and dark abundance
of what's joyfully absurd and playful about life
whether it's doing a sword dance with words
or dancing in blue heron feathers
like a shaman among waterbirds
longing for enlightenment
like a tantric star map
to break the jinx of their prayer-wheels.
Or dancing to bullets like a greenhorn
in the main street of nineteenth century Dodge
or like me out here in the country dark
alone with six thousand visible stars
eleven miles outside of Westport
spreading my wings under the sign
of the Eagle and the Swan going down in the west
to add my phoenix to the feathers of the burning sumac
and grabbing the lightning lance of the thunderbirds
like a serpent from their talons
hold it up to the stars to the east and the west
like the wavelength of a crazy insight
into the dark word of the living light
that makes me dance my way
out of time
out of place
out of my mind
without leaving anyone or anything behind.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Better To Flash A Sharp Knife Quickly
Better to flash a sharp knife quickly across someone's throat
as the last remaining mercy
than bludgeon them to death retroactively as you do.
The first is just another big city workaday murder on the nightshift
but the way your offended sense of righteous indignation
has turned to hate
as you sit there sliding needles into your arm
like loveletters into a bruised envelope
you've addressed in blood to yourself
I can tell you're sticking pins into the eyes
of black madonna voodoo dolls
deep inside a secret hiding place in your childhood
where you indoctrinate them into genocide.
You're a beautiful woman with lots to hide
and I don't want to know where the corpses are
as if the only intimacies worth caring about
were all long buried in this desert of stars.
And twice before I've tasted the blood of the black widow
and yes it may be sweetened
by all the butterflies it's eaten
but then your heart goes numb as an ice-cube
in the fix at the end
that comes on like an eclipse
of the light at the end of the tunnel
where all your dead relatives
are dying to greet you again.
I wear my heart on my sleeve
like the colours of the ghetto I was born into
to watch my mother die of overwork for nothing
of any estimable value including me
when I look at it from her point of view.
And I like the sexy West Coast sixties look
of those black Stevie Nicks Gothic spider webs
you wear more like skin
than the net of Indra
with jewels at every intersection.
And I've always been tempted and still am
by dangerous pariahs on the lamb
from the witch-hunts of medieval men
who fear a female messiah
that can cast her nets wider
than any constellation
among the fishers of men.
And o sweetness don't doubt yourself.
It's still a cheap thrill to feel so sublimely vulnerable
daring the taboo event horizons of your powers
like a firefly going eye to eye with a blackhole
even as I bend space to stay clear as a gravitational lens.
But you're hooked on your own elixirs
like a dealer who wants to get out of it
on his own product
and in my world magic shoots the stars
like whitewater in the Ottawa River
in the spring run off in May
when the toxins wear off like cataracts
and you get high on the risk for free
in the name of sick children
waiting for heart transplants.
And yes, yes, yes, there's still a Neanderthal in me
that wants to paint your face
in carbon and red ochre
on the inside of my witchdoctor's mask
to make all this space seem
a lot less lonely in here
since I killed off the last cave bear.
I could so easily encrypt my starmaps
on the mystic enigmas of the dice
I've carved like small Kaabas
and Rubik's cubes out of my own bones
to see if the nightbird calling out to you
in this mutual darkness of ours
were worth taking the chance
if it should happen to come up snake eyes.
Or if I could learn to be hypnotized
without turning to stone
by a Pythian priestess
with a Medusan hairdo
with oracular highlights that bite
and you could learn to dance
to the picture-music
of a different kind of flute
like Salome for Herod
and John the Baptist's head.
Love doesn't begin where lust leaves off.
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame.
I think that's only true for those who are no good at it.
Or dominated by a spiritual Gestapo
that makes the body wear a yellow star.
Three phases of the moon.
Maiden. Mother. Crone.
I've seen the spider with its crescent fangs.
And I've hung from my own spine more than once
like a mummified fly on a trophy line
waiting for my next afterlife
assuming I had one
and Merlin I may seem to you
but I still fear a starless power darker than my own.
And there's the maiden like Morgana la Fay
beguiling as lunar waterlilies and deadly nightshade
renewing her virginity in a snake pit.
The urge to possess you overwhelms
the certainty of being bit.
One fang kills you.
The other fang cures it.
But even death eventually wears out its welcome
and the spring isn't enough to make up for it.
But where's the middle extreme
defined by the other two?
Where's the mother?
Where's the summer
that warms the bloodstreams of the garden snakes
like water in a basking hose?
Spring and winter
but where's the harvest moon
that shines down on the fullness of life
and adds her mother lode to the gold of the grain
like Demeter in the Eleusinian Mysteries
adding little mushrooms of gratified desire
to the wine you only need to drink once
out of your own skull
to stay intoxicated forever?
Prosperpine may have gone down into the underworld
to shoot jewels with the dead
when a serpent bit her in the heel
like a dirty syringe
but when is she going to live up
to the rest of her myth
and drive the snakes out of her garden
long enough for a rose bush or two to take root again?
You leave two kids at home alone
with a couch-surfing crackhead
you met in a bar last weekend
and you expect me to trust you?
Lady I can look through you
like a broken windowpane
and still appreciate the beauty of the view
without cutting myself on the flint knapped glass
and yes you can still cast a spell
that can turn seasoned sailors into swine
and I could so easily
buy into any delusion you wanted me to
just to sleep with you.
But I'm standing at that window with your kids
and there's a crackhead behind us
flipping channels like cards in a game of solitaire
and we're looking out at the view together
pretending none of us are there
because we're all scared
of the cranky stranger with the tarantula tattoo
and all we can see as far as we can look to get away
is this mindscape of you
salting the flesh of the good earth
like Carthage on crystal meth
when you should be planting seeds
in the hearts and minds of those
who look to you for love
like a chance to flower
even on long starless nights
to live without fear
unmenaced by shadows
swarming the night light
like a seance of anti-matter.
You belong to those who love you in life
and blood may be thicker than water
but without water
it coagulates like a rose that's lost its colour.
It makes raisins of the grapes on the vine
long before their time
as if someone cancelled summer
and no one gets to taste the wine.
And it's probably wise
to pour both into the cauldron of your heart
until they're both so intermingled
the rain doesn't put
the scarlet desires
and phoenix fires
of the passionate poppies out
and the hot-blooded gypsy witches
don't turn the rain to steam
on first contact with their skin.
We're standing at a broken window
and we're looking in
and what we see is that in you
there is no summer
and where blood should be thicker than water
the water's turned to ice
and the two rosebuds
standing like your daughters at this window
like two cut flowers in a shattered vase
are haemorrhaging like too much turpentine
on two brushes loaded with red paint
too thin to bloom.
Because the ladybug
is too busy playing with matches
trying to get a rise out of the fire-hydrants
to see if she's still the arsonist she used to be
to know when her own house is on fire
her kids are alone
and it's time to fly away home.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Im On Fire For You Baby
(david elliott)
Published by polygram international - ascap
This empty space Ive held so long
You come around, and now Im warm
I thought that I was havin fun
And now I see the way its done
I thought wed led a life before
And who we were, well Im not sure
But one thing I know is right
I loved you then, Im gonna love you tonight
Im on fire for you baby, fire for you woman, all night
Im on fire for you baby, fire for you woman, all night
So dont take your time, its gettin late
We might lose if we hesitate
Cause bein free is lots of fun
For me, though Im just 21
I got things to do, and things to see
Might even have to leave you be
But till that time, lets give our all
And dont look back, until you fall
Im on fire for you baby, fire for you woman, all night
Im on fire for you baby, fire for you woman, all night
Itd be a shame, if our games, were doin us
With all the time spent on tryin, then to lose your lovin
So come on girl, well raise the sky
Well break on through, well get so high
And dont worry about tomorrows world
The time is now, I need you girl
Im on fire for you baby, fire for you woman, all night
Im on fire for you baby, fire for you woman, all night
Im on fire for you baby, fire for you woman, all night
Im on fire for you baby, fire for you woman, all night
Im on fire for you baby, fire for you woman, all night
song performed by by April Wine
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The Death of a Raven
As I was taking a tour today
I saw a raven lying dead by the side of a bank
He lay there lone, cold, dead
Nobody to bury, cremate, or carry him away
I felt sad
I felt life is so sudden, so short
A couple of ravens kept circling the dead
They tried to tell me something of the raven dead
But I couldn't understand them
Because I don't know as how to interpret the language of the raven
The raven lay dead by the pavement of the bank
He lay sideways
His feet up
His dead beak closed and dead
I felt a sudden rush of hopelessness, a sudden rush of undefined pain
I didn't stop there to mourn the raven's death
I ran away as fast my legs would pace
The raven is dead
Everything around him goes as usual
Life is a continuous process
Time, tide, space flows on their own pace
Nobody notices the death of the raven
Except me
My soul saddens by the death of the unknown raven
The sky is dark and cloudy
It threatens rain
A few drops dropp here and there to make the scorched ground a little
wet
I cry for the dead raven
Please spare a pray for the dead raven
poem by Ujjol Kamal
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Fire In Cairo
Slowly fading blue
The eastern hollows catch
The dying sun
Night-time follows
Silence and black
Mirror pool mirrors
The lonely place
Where i meet you
See your head
In the fading light
And through the dark
Your eyes shine bright
And burn
Like fire
Burn like fire in cairo
Burn like fire
Burn like fire in cairo
Shifting crimson veil
Silken hips slide
Under my hand
Swollen lips whisper
My name
And i yearn
You take me in your arms
And start to burn
F-i-r-e-i-n-c-a-i-r-o
F-i-r-e-i-n-c-a-i-r-o
F-i-r-e-i-n-c-a-i-r-o
Then the heat disappears
And the mirage
Fades away
F-i-r-e-i-n-c-a-i-r-o
F-i-r-e-i-n-c-a-i-r-o
F-i-r-e-i-n-c-a-i-r-o
F-i-r-e-i-n-c-a-i-r-o
F-i-r-e-i-n-c-a-i-r-o
F-i-r-e-i-n-c-a-i-r-o
F-i-r-e-i-n-c-a-i-r-o
F-i-r-e-i-n-c-a-i-r-o
Burn like a fire in cairo
Burn like a
Fire
Blaze like a fire in cairo
Blaze like a
Fire
Flare
Burn like fire
Burn like
Fire in cairo
song performed by by Cure
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Country Sweat
Sweat!
Sweat!
Sweat!
Born for trouble, poised for action
Ready to spring at a moment's notice
Nerves like a trigger, waiting to be pulled
Covered with sweat, it ain't nice
Sweat!
Help me please I'm burning up
I got this fire in my heart
Won't let me sleep, can't concentrate
Even when it's cold I'm dripping sweat
It ain't nice
Sweat!
Rivers running down my back
Makes me slippery, like a fish
If I don't stop, I might drown
Falling down, down, down, down, not dead yet
covered with
Sweat
CHORUS
The cool boys bit the dust
They couldn't take the pressure
The cool girls got knocked up
They only wanted to have fun
(Where did they go?)
They fell in low and suffered
(Where did they go?)
They picked up guns and hammers
(Where did they go?)
Without friction there's no heat
WIthout heat there's no fire
Without fire there's no desire
You're making me hot, hot, hot, hot!
Sweat! Sweat!
Take my baby, Saturday night
It's hundred and ten, it's alright
Close the door to my little room
Starting to sweat, fun starts soon
Sweat!
Principal caught me after school
Gave me hell, called me a fool
Pointed his finger, at my face
Started to sweat all over the place
Flowed like rivers, onto the floor
I can take it, give me some more
Sweat!
War breaks out throughout the land
Dodging bullets in the sand
Enemy's getting much to close
Sun beats down on the back of my neck
Fingers twitchin', covered with sweat
Covered with sweat
CHORUS
Sweat!
song performed by by Oingo Boingo
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Forever
Slowly fading blue
The eastern hollows catch
The dying sun
Night time follows
Silent and black
Mirror pool mirrors
The lonely place
Where I meet you
See your head
In the fading light
And through the dark
Your eyes shine bright
And burn like fire
Burn like fire in Cairo
Burn like fire
Burn like fire in Cairo
Shifting crimson veil
Silken hips slide
Under my hand
Swollen lips whisper my name
And I yearn
You take me in your arms
And start to burn
F.I.R.E.I.N.C.A.I.R.O
Then the heat disappears
And the mirage
Fades away...
F.I.R.E.I.N.C.A.I.R.O
Burn like a fire in Cairo
Burn like a fire
Blaze like a fire in Cairo
Blaze like a fire
Flare with a wonderful light
Like a fire in Cairo
Burn like fire
Burn like
Fire in Cairo
song performed by by Cure
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Narcissus Lost His Face In The Mirror He Stored His Image In
Narcissus lost his face in the mirror he stored his image in
while Lady Nightshade was saying grace over the wrong coffin
rats from the shipwreck were rowing ashore
in the last lifeboat with a trapdoor in it for an emergency exit.
The holy men who couldn't speak our language
without trying to fix it with an accent of their own
were recruiting for an army on the moon
to start a new crusade against futuristic infidels
who didn't share the same direction of prayer
as the wavelengths that reached the ears of the extraterrestrials
with high ideals encoded in a scripture of esoteric starmaps
that spoke like oracles stoned on volcanic gas
so when you asked how things were going,
they always answered, perhaps, in an ambiguous tone of voice.
I was sitting in the window of a burning house
trying to write poems that smelled like smoke to the Holy Ghost,
when you showed up like a stranger's doorway
out of my solitude like the bell of a three alarm death knell
with the smile that lingered like junkmail on the threshold
of a black hole that said jump right in, there's light
on the other side of sin if you go through this
like a death in life experience in love with cosmic bliss.
Who could forget that day you came like a muse
up the leaf strewn stairs of an abandoned orphanage
looking for a heart you could inspire with the ruse
of the poetic refuse you left in the wake of your pilgrimage
like the desolation of your absence from the earthbound
that languished in the eclipse of your innocence
like a spiritual lost and found trying to make sense of itself
like a horse with a broken leg on a zodiacal merry-go-round.
I felt the fangs of your crescent moons pierce my flesh
like a staple gun under a rosebush in league
with an alliance of thorns that liked to see a poet bleed
as if the great mystery of love were nothing
but a conspiratorial intrigue of sword dancers on drugs
though I did everything I could to prove to you I was wrong
about the moonrise, you weren't strong enough to be right for once
without starting a pogrom that interrogated
the light in my eyes for all those dark winter months
I never confessed, I never cried out as if ice were my only alibi.
I sat in the corner like a left-handed guitar with a dunce cap on
and wrote out lyrics that sang like the stars with a lisp
on your celestial blackboard until I felt like Sisyphus
a note shy of pushing my heart like a moon rock over the top.
It was the immanental sixties on a grailquest
for the objective correlative of a universal paradigm
it could fight under as the sign of a revolutionary new design of chaos
that made love not war to the thunder of home-made sonic booms
in a battle of bands with saturation bombing riffs and rimshots
that urged us to surrender to the enemy as if
they were dragonflies and quarter-notes of music
in a riot of helicopters dropping tear gas over Watts.
Even the madness wasn't enough to mollify the sadness
of what we lost when everyone turned the lightshows out
in the concert halls and went back to the their atavistic law schools
to get a grip on the necks of the things they had let go of for a lark.
And the last time I saw you, before things went totally dark,
you were trying to set fire to my voice-box
like a lightning rod with bad wiring shorting out
like a bass amp on the stage of your burnt out farewell
to the audience that made a gracious bow to your frantic id
and headed for the exit like an arsonist long before you did.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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A Little Thought In A Big Space
A little thought in a big space, I'm falling
through my own immensities here at my desk,
one of my Icarian propensities for plunging into things.
My voice intimidated by the violence of the silence within.
I'm on the dark side of my eyes.
No one's ever been here before.
No window, no wall, no door,
I'm on the threshold of my homelessness again.
I'm looking at stars, but I feel like rain.
I'm talking to ghosts that I don't remember.
Might be the wrong medium, but it's the right seance.
I don't even know what I'm doing here myself
but it seems I'm free to go or stay as I wish.
I'm wearing my shadow like a candling parachute
that didn't step back from the edge in time.
No point in pretending you're an airborne dandelion
when you feel like a rock with a message
someone just threw like the moon through a mirror
disguised as a sky the night birds keep flying into blind.
No one asks your name here on this pyre of a sky burial
if your birth certificate says you were born in fire.
Desire anything you like. It was all written in smoke
before you came. And these words that are saying me here
have been out of the aviary of the lantern for light years.
Who knows where the light goes or what if falls upon?
Trying to shine in a dark time without taking anything away
from the lunar eclipses that aren't in need of enlightenment.
Don't know if I'm a solar flare, a firefly, a matchbook,
or a lightning bolt that keeps stressing my starmud out
by sneaking up on it from behind and overdoing things a bit.
If you find yourself trying to pry the flowers open
with a crowbar or a koan, and it's nightfall, it's
time to turn your hourglass in for a waterclock
and see how the stars emerge out of nothing
as soon as you deepen the dark with a more acute sense of timing
that let's everything happen spontaneously by itself.
Even if you're the lighthouse of your dreams
that doesn't mean you're the nightwatchman
keeping his third eye on you in the shadows
like a theft of fire you can get away with
this second time around with only a warning.
If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.
And if you did, whining about it in your sleep
isn't going to help and who's Spartan enough these days
to stash the fox under their tunic to keep
from being caught while it eats them alive?
If you want to be a dragon you've got to learn
to swallow people's hearts like hot coals as if they were chocolates,
without wincing. The stars don't come out
like emergency candles you've been saving
for exactly this kind of situation. And if
you really want to know the truth about illumination,
try and blow one out. Quick, now, look
and see immediately into the clear light of the void
what it's like to shine without a metaphoric reflection.
The stars here don't hide their nakedness under a cloak
of black holes and dwarfs that take it all in
but give nothing back like the second hand clothes
of serpents shedding their skin. One size fits all
like a bubble in a watershed of dark worlds
dazzled by how much a single eye can contain
whether it's hanging from the lip of a flower in the fall
or going down the drain in spring. I know
you hit it like a snowflake on a furnace
and do your damnedest not to cry. Thing is
as unique among billions as you think you are,
there's not a star in the sky that isn't a rite of passage.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Someone Lingers In Your Absence Like An Icon
Someone lingers in your absence like an icon, a gate
to an open field where the white horse
that stood in the tall grass, grazing on its solitude
like a phase of the moon come to earth
is gone. A bird, a purple martin with so much
distance and disappearance in it wings
and the open vastness of the skies it was absorbed by
I can barely hear you singing from here
over the raving of an unkempt wind on a crazy night
when the ghosts are rioting in their graves
like old leaves without attachments at the feet of the new
and gravity receives the grave goods of the tree
as do I these strange epiphanies of you
that haunt me retroactively like apple-bloom.
And the depth of the emptiness that informs
the substance of my imaginings, devastates me
like an eclipse slowly swallowing my heart
like a black cataract of snake skin I keep
trying to shake like a cosmic egg without much luck.
As if I were bleeding out like a rose after
the green thorns have hardened into fangs
that are killing and curing me at the same time.
Some nights I just want to join my emptiness to yours
and be done with it, no more of this, no more.
No more of watching the beauty of the world
burn out into a dark radiance that makes me
want to gouge my eyes out so I can see it without wincing.
Without feeling so wounded by the abundance of the rose
that blooms and disappears like the auroral apparitions
of a widow in veils of spider webs and black lightning,
thinking it might be you under there somewhere I can't go
without losing you again. Check-mate. Pain.
And it isn't anything either of us can do anything about.
It just goes down that way. The absence of your shining,
small nonrenewable gestures of your heart and hands
vividly recalled like modest butterfly volumes of poetry
blowing down an abandoned street at night in the rain, you
sewing a patch on my heart with the delicacy of a needle
mending a flying carpet grounded like a wavelength of light.
As I am now that you've become that rip in my heart
all the stars are pouring out of like a puncture wound
I let go right through me like needles and gamma rays
piercing the heart of a voodoo doll of dark matter
that makes me feel like wooden puppet of light
carved out of one of these black walnut trees.
Endure. Participate. See. Wonder.
Praise. Celebrate. Mourn. Do the next best thing.
And when you're hurting your worst, sing.
And even when I'm soldiering my way through stone
like a flying fish in the wrong medium,
or walking alone with the Alone through the woods,
just to meet you where you ask me to when you call
and I come like a burning bridge down to the river,
wondering if I might have lived here once in another lifetime,
I do say these things to myself like medicinal chants
and preventative medicine, healing totems with benign effect
hung in the medicine bag slung around my neck.
Sweet grass and a pinch of sacred earth, just in case
I forget how to dance on my own grave
with grace and flare and style and an enigmatic smile
that really means it if it really means anything at all.
Or not succumb to this ice-age of a bell
my tongue is stuck to like a child's to a wire fence,
or this black diamond nightbird
that cuts my darkness to the quick
because it's got nothing to sing about
that can answer the call of the living for someone
on a foggy hill to come to the rescue of the empty lifeboat
drifting like the corpse of a dead swan downriver,
except the dead air of this strange place
where space is indelibly bruised by the passing
of the beauty it once contained like stars in a Mason jar.
Like a candle in the lantern of a skull
I've carried before me like a nightwatchman
on the edge of a dangerous precipice for lightyears
until I lost my footing and fell in one night,
as I once did into love, and learned to see in the dark
I was growing wings where I had none before
and looking up from the bottom of an empty wishing well
noticed the dead still blooming like stars
in the white shadows of the sun at midnight.
And out of the corners of my eyes
when what I can't see what need to know about being alive
comes looking for me like the sacred syllable
on the lips of a pearl diver on the moon in total eclipse
like a kiss out of nowhere, comes like the singing bird
to the dead branch in my heart
that's having trouble remembering how to blossom
after a long winter, as if you'd summoned me to the trees
like a purple passage in the Book of the Dead,
to teach me how to take the pain
and through the alchemy of the grief
that flows through my heartwood like light and rain
turn it into life again, as if every leaf
were a new loveletter from the dead
I've been saving for years like expurgated starmaps
illustrated by exiled constellations in Braille
to a spiritual lost and found at my fingertips
where they know who you are, and they've seen you
like a soft moonrise glowing through the willows
down by the river that weeps like a black mirror
for the stars and waterbirds in passing
that appear and disappear each in its time
and you wait for me like the longing of the dead
to make some kind of sign, however simple and austere,
the withered star of a wild rose without a flower,
that let's me know you're near, you're here
rooted in me on earth where we've both come
to renew our shining from the bottom up to the blossom.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Oretown
The night stank of diesel
And a stranger came to town
A cold wind blowing
And the rain pouring down
Street lights flicker
And the power lines moan
The moon beat down
On a river of bone
Someone put the lights out
No one make a sound
You wont find a thing
Down in oretown
Foundry spits fire and smoke
Airs foul and choking
Sky full of sulphur
Mountains flat and broken
Black fogs and whirlwinds
Thunder and rain
Open drink madness
And purple mad pain
The circus is over
Exit the clowns
Nobodys laughing
Down in oretown
The ships in the harbour
Cargos been pawned
Barrooms spilling sailors
All shipwrecked at dawn
Smelling of salt and rust
Uniforms torn
Came looking for flowers
Only found thorns
Dreaming of mermaids
In pearly white gowns
Tain is sleeping
Down in oretown
Theres a madman down on mainstreet
Eyes all aflame
Laughing in the thunder
Of the number 9 train
Selling old postcards in rusty frames
A thousand views of oretown
And they all look the same
Dressed up in sandals
And a barbed wire crown
A lot of people loose their minds
Down in oretown
Lock up the lawman
Let go the thief
Rounding up the grey men
Nail them to a tree
This town was a palace
This town was aglow
Then the sky burned orange
And the iron river flowed
The night stank of diesel
A stranger came to town
The night folded over
Down in oretown
song performed by by Pogues
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Sweat
Sweat!
Sweat!
Sweat!
Born for trouble, poised for action
Ready to spring at a moments notice
Nerves like a trigger, waiting to be pulled
Covered with sweat, it aint nice
Sweat!
Help me please Im burning up
I got this fire in my heart
Wont let me sleep, cant concentrate
Even when its cold Im dripping sweat
It aint nice
Sweat!
Rivers running down my back
Makes me slippery, like a fish
If I dont stop, I might drown
Falling down, down, down, down, not dead yet
Covered with
Sweat
Chorus
The cool boys bit the dust
They couldnt take the pressure
The cool girls got knocked up
They only wanted to have fun
(where did they go? )
They fell in low and suffered
(where did they go? )
They picked up guns and hammers
(where did they go? )
Without friction theres no heat
Without heat theres no fire
Without fire theres no desire
Youre making me hot, hot, hot, hot!
Sweat! sweat!
Take my baby, saturday night
Its hundred and ten, its alright
Close the door to my little room
Starting to sweat, fun starts soon
Sweat!
Principal caught me after school
Gave me hell, called me a fool
Pointed his finger, at my face
Started to sweat all over the place
Flowed like rivers, onto the floor
I can take it, give me some more
Sweat!
War breaks out throughout the land
Dodging bullets in the sand
Enemys getting much to close
Sun beats down on the back of my neck
Fingers twitchin, covered with sweat
Covered with sweat
Chorus
Sweat!
song performed by by Oingo Boingo
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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