The Old School

Twisted wrought-iron
Rusty chain
Old green tree
With silent laughter
Trembling each leaf
To the happy wind

Teacher
Raving lunatic psychopath
Now grey and kindly
with scraps of short-pants memory
That is you.
Thick lenses squint your man-face
To wrinkles of a naughty, dirty, child-man.

Adverbial clause quadratic equation
Third battle of Panipat
Warren Hastings dead for ever
But his memory
Grows differently
With each clay mind
Moulded twisted beaten
With school-master cane

First Day.
Farewell adieu forever mother
Swallowed into mindless patter
of black-hole feet
Salty crystal brown eye
Fine graffiti wood
Cold comfort.

Paper plane fantasy
Grounded by anti-aircraft ma'am
Antique gene-cousin
To a buck-toothed tram
Boysterous back-bench wit
And a gaggle of giggly skirts
Shadow-dark shoes
Painfully starched shirts
and skinned knee blues...
Nostalgia hurts.

Swinging out into empty sky
Sliding to sandy sand
She-saw justice and
Boy-scout two-fingered honour

March March March
(Mind fever exam God and neighbour help us all)
In April we go home.

Class of '83
Scattered like memory
That still lives

Alumnus
Friendly castaway
With residual red-bottomed schoolboy hate
And fading childhearted joy




For The Home School. What a place it was.

Parsley Sage Rosemary and Rhyme

Ha ha. Found some of my old poetry, stuff written in the mid 90s, by a no-doubt-conceited teenager. Unbelievable stuff. sheesh.

Down to Urth
There's a butterfly shouting somewhere
To a meddling mosquito's cantata
There's a lieuten-ant with a pomme-de-terre
And not the ear for the operetta

Stocks his bobbing abdomen
With starchy sustenance
Hasn't the fine acumen
Of cultural parlance
He's never looked at the sky.
Never wondered why.

With a well-filled ante-room larder
He's felt to be a good father

To a Pencil
You've a whole wood body
And a belly full of lead
Scratch my black thoughts on white
Spew yourself dead.

Mindless self-sacrificial pole
Dwindling every day
Duller every minute
Etch out what you mean.

What forgotten mother spawned your length
Slim waif of word and song
Nondescript pulchritude
In writing flesh and bone you belong.

Six-cornered circle
with dark blind centre eye
Watch where you draw your line
When you die you'll leave behind
Only your charred soul

God help your earthlife dust
If there's a rubber close to hand
Your fragments
Tomorrow's sand.



There's a lot more... will probably put em up sometime.

It's a bit strange, having someone else sing songs you've written, especially if you've gotten really accustomed to singing them yourself. But I really do think it's beginning to work. Just have to put in so much more time.

Dunno what's happening with work though.. there just seems to be more and more to do, more and more that's taking me away from playing and writing music. Or am I just being hog headed and whiny. Work is good, after all. Pays the bills. So I shouldn't complain, I guess. Our big clients now want us to be a full-fledged agency, a one-stop shop that would probably make the most sense for them, but I wonder if I have the time, mindspace, ambition, and the drive to plunge into something like that. I know there's a lot of money to be made and I know I'd probably be good at what needs to be done, but. But. Ah heck.

Giggigigigigigigigigigigigigigig

Been a while. Busy, busy, busy. TAAQ opens for Jethro Tull here in Bangalore day after tomorrow, Feb 3. Wow. Five years from our similar experience with Deep Purple. Our resume seems to be looking up...