1. |
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Is not everything morbid?
On Storm King Mountain a log cabin
Was Djuna’s unconventional home.
The child who taught her brothers and sisters
Was abused when she was 16 years old
Married off to a man 30 years older
But she left him after a couple of months
In New York she became a writer breaking the rules
Depicting the bodies of women explicitly
It’s not where you wash your neck,
It’s where you moisten your throat that counts
Suffering is how I’ve learned
everything that I know
Is not everything morbid?
When you’re drunk on shadow wine
Is not everything morbid?
When ugliness is all you find
Is not everything morbid?
Force fed what you do not want
Is not everything morbid?
Your being burning with revolt
Djuna's heart was shattered in the city of love
Thelma totally shunned her when Nightwood came out
Silence makes experience
Go much further, you know
Something unendurable
Can then lead to joy
Is not everything morbid?
When you’re drunk on shadow wine
Is not everything morbid?
When ugliness is all you find
Is not everything morbid?
Force fed what you do not want
Is not everything morbid?
Your being burning with revolt
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2. |
Chomolungma
03:07
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No human can ever acclimatise to life up there
On the Goddess mother of mountains
Her slopes littered with corpses - what a bucket list
It’s a nightmare rainbow valley
Chomolungma
The fearsome peak 15
Chomolungma
Frozen and battered by jet streams
Chomolungma
Seduced so many there to climb
Chomolungma
Your victims frozen in time
This tent is rising above me like a cathedral
My mind crazed by the lack of oxygen
With this summit fever I can’t distinguish life from death
There’s not time to enjoy the view.
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3. |
Mr Stanley, I presume
04:13
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Mr Stanley, I presume
you don't mind me talking about your work
For it seems you have no guilt
for all the blood that you've spilt in Africa.
Mr Stanley, I presume
that you can sleep quite well at night
For your civilising mission
you don’t have any contrition or remorse.
His childhood screwed him up
The parts he didn’t make up
He fled across the seas
From his nightmares he was never free.
Mr Stanley, I presume
Your stolen name has done you well.
Unable to tell the truth
Like Trump and Johnson, you embellished everything
Mr Stanley, I presume
King Leopold gave a handsome reward
For the Congo’s bloody regime
But how much gold will soothe your soul?
The liars never learn
As we watch our planet burn
Can we distinguish the fake
Before it is too late?
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4. |
Elegant and brutal
02:09
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Elegant and Brutal
A mass of contradictions, he wrote through the night
A suave intellectual with a fighter inside
He dreamed of a medieval Samurai life
A repressed homosexual with a beautiful wife
He was so elegant and brutal
Playing with swords and conjuring words
So sad there was no cause to die for
Hiding his shame by playing the game
His dad ripped his manuscripts said they were for girls
His grandparents kept him from the outside world
He thought all the sickness had come from the West
Honing the muscles in his arms and his chest
He was so elegant and brutal
Playing with swords and conjuring words
So sad there was no cause to die for
Hiding his shame by playing the game
They booed and jeered his speech
His decision had been reached
For him not to grow old
Falling on his sword, an act of Harakiri
Was he weak or strong,
A coward or a hero?
Debates rage on and on
An endless mystery, or just his tragedy?
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5. |
Made their misfortune
03:08
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Made their misfortune
Head west at the right time if you want to survive
Misguided superiority will not keep you alive
You cannot gobble up these nations
When you don’t know their lands
Blind leaders should be cursed
There’s no God-given right to expand
Racing the weather to where the grass is greener
In the salt desert two days turned into five
You cannot conquer nature in this harsh environment
Only the strongest will survive
Gambling on shortcuts wagons stuck in the snow
Too far from Independence and everything you know
You’re going to face some hard times here
In this flimsy tent
So many people already gone
Lying frozen and spent
Racing the weather to where the grass is greener
In the salt desert two days turned into five
You cannot conquer nature in this harsh environment
Only the strongest will survive
Forlorn, forlorn, forlorn,
The only protein left is those who’re gone
Forlorn, forlorn, forlorn,
A ghoulish group got stuck in a snowstorm
Forlorn, forlorn, forlorn,
These pioneers really made their misfortune
Forlorn, forlorn, forlorn,
Their family and friends were taken far too soon
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6. |
Lightning telegram
04:00
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Lightning Telegram
A small prick with a rusty pin
Took his father when he was a teen
After that he washed his hands obsessively.
In the solitude of cell 103
A teenage marxist discovering poetry
Ready to jettison all of history.
Slapping taste in the face
Shooting art through the heart
Trying to manufacture happiness
A bayonet pen, a backbone flute
Drunk with glory, but no parachute
As he fell out of love with this world far too fast.
How strange to be a futurist from the past
Brooding in his yellow blouse with knotted brows
The kind of man to love his best friend’s wife
Then say “Our planet is poorly equipped for delight.”
How strange to be a futurist from the past
Trapped in a love triangle and a communist tangle
Towering above it all and debasing his art
A satirist yearning for acceptance by his targets.
44 years before I was born,
He drew a lead full stop.
How could it have ended any other way?
He was not a man for slow decay
After his second death
He became what he’d hated.
Airbrushed and tone deaf
Crudely, unthinkingly celebrated.
Now send me a lightning telegram, you said it would crush my dreams!
Your revolutionary art put a bullet through your heart.
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7. |
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The mind created a monster
When you devoted yourself to chemicals
It created an imbalance
You rejected the best that Earth could offer
She held sway over young men’s hearts
But you were shocked by imperfection
Poisoning your life with sorrow and decay
The mind created a monster
She shuddered at his gaze
The stain of acid on his fingers
Wouldn’t go away
The crimson hand kept mocking him
Unless her cheek really glowed
Overcoming nature would be a miracle
She didn’t want to be an object of disgust
Perfection was worth any risk
He said “don’t doubt my power!”
The mind created a monster
She shuddered at his gaze
The stain of acid on his fingers
Wouldn’t go away
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8. |
Blind bends
03:56
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Blind bends
It’s so dark I can’t see my hand
In a plane in a blizzard that’s trying to land
Holding my placard in invisible ink
White noise in my mind as I’m trying to think.
My mind’s flying round blind bends
It’s like a ride with college friends
On a foggy night
My mind’s going round blind bends
It’s like a ride with college friends
On a foggy night
It's so dark and I'm wrapped in the past
Remembering the love that didn't last
Cringing at words I should never have said
Flinching at times I nearly ended up dead
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9. |
I never thought
03:19
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I never thought
Playground bullies with their tongue behind their bottom lip
Everybody knows what’s coming next
Mimicking a spastic from Blue Peter
A man who overcame so many things
Tell me what will you achieve in your life
To rival what Joey Deacon did
Can you ever overcome your lack of empathy?
Not teaching hatred to your kids
I never thought that I would write a song
To praise the butt of all the jokes
I wish I’d never gone along with them
It’s overdue I spoke
Sleepwalking through a valley full of insults
Now it really makes me feel quite sick
Always picking on the ones who couldn’t fight back
Strength’s the only thing that won respect
Tell me what will you achieve in your life
To rival what Joey Deacon did
Can you ever overcome your lack of empathy?
Not teaching hatred to your kids
I never thought that I would write a song
To praise the butt of all the jokes
I wish I’d never gone along with that
It’s overdue I spoke
Don’t laugh along with racists, sexist pigs,
homophobic assholes and don’t use ableist slurs
We should find inspiration
Not laugh at them cos they’re different
There is so much to learn
If you look at life afresh every day
It’s time we threw the old ways
full of prejudice away
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10. |
Keep the nightmares out
04:56
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Keep the nightmares out
She played the clown, the carpenter, the nurse and the witch
A woman who felt every bump and scratched every itch
With her ear close to her soul, she listened hard and long
Her sickness stifled all the joy that she had known
The daisies thanked her for her admiration innocent and white
But picket fences couldn’t keep the nightmares out
Her eyes full of terrible confessions and mouth stained by an old kiss
But still Anne skipped around in post poetical bliss.
She said that love was like a cough and you just can’t conceal it
But lost in her mind without a map she could not feel it
Writers are phonies who don’t live by their own insights
But when your life goes backwards it’s hard to keep up the fight
The trouble with life is that people are strangers
And the joy that isn't shared dies young
She was the crazy one who thought words reach people
But then she left the engine on.
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Joe Peacock Birmingham, UK
I'm a prolific singer-songwriter from Birmingham - a genre-hopping storyteller, whose music has been compared to Bowie, Blur, Costello and many others. Mostly, my songs tell stories that I find interesting and thought provoking. My music has all been recorded at home so far and all money from the digital sales of my music go into paying producers/mixing & mastering engineers. ... more
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