Last night, she came to me,
like a midnight train through snow-deep forests,
moving oh so gracefully,
to ease my pain and help me to rest.
Punctual as the church bell's chime,
yet not bound to the tracks she follows;
free to metamorphosise,
she wanders from the path she well knows,
changing to a wild cat,
to roam the undergrowth alone
and silent, lest she wakes my sleep;
she guards me like I was her own.
And should she tire of Earth's rewards,
she just takes flight and soars towards
the stars, a wise old owl who perches
high upon a branch and watches
over me, should Death appear
to stalk the forest with his fear.
If I am frightened, she'll be there
to ward off evil, to love and care.
Behold, this nightingale so small,
who answers me whene'er I call
with soothing song of sweet romance
that lifts my heart and mind to trance.
Tonight, she comes to me in dreams:
my angel bathes in moonlit streams
of crystal waters, swift and deep.
She swims toward me as I sleep,
her hair flows sensually behind her,.
She sings to me, that I might find her
soon, and we will swim together...
can this moment last forever?
Tomorrow night, she'll come to me,
and astronauts together we'll be,
hurtling through the universe
with space and time a blur behind us.
Travelling twice the speed of light,
and wondering at this awesome sight,
we'll go where no-one's gone before
and find our paradise for sure.
At night, she comes to me
her beauty revives me
her tender caress is ecstasy
I see her
I breathe her
She is my oxygen; I need her to survive...
Originally composed on 1991-05-13 for the nurse who was looking after me in QE2 Hospital, Welwyn Garden City, as I slipped in and out of consciousness through a seemingly endless night following a head injury (from falling off a car at University - don't ask!). This new version was rewritten at home in Nottingham on a beautiful summer's afternoon of 1991-09-01. Many thanks to Harold Budd (for his soothing song of sweet romance) and Roger Eno for musical inspiration, and of course, to Nurse Nikki Draper for being such an angel.
In quiescent pools, watched over
by the spectre of night,
I celebrate you;
I await your smooth caress
of gleaming blue fluorescence
creeping over darkness,
changing it to beauty.
Now illuminated by you,
this wondrous place
(where rare ripples
tantalise the water's edge
with lilting musicality)
takes on a life of its own
and is instantly greeted
by composers and poets
and artists world-wide,
who hasten to get to know its
delectable charms and describe
its splendour to all humankind,
through music and painting
and language and mind-
to-mind thinking, linking
all nations as one
in the unified quest
for genuine freedom
where no-one should suffer
at the expense of another.
You make all of this clear.
June 1993
The flat shock kept his form diverse;
his claustrophobic taste of manhood rejected behaviourism
in favour of a glossy new egoism.
Possibilist equators lived among frontal relatives,
shepherds criticised law and mobile laundries,
sandy kings expelled cricket-playing imperialism.
All around him, gourmet tobacconists & submarine angels coalesce,
striving to evolve into hermaphrodite verbal tributaries,
glaciating their way to the five phosphorous delicatessens.
Outside the crumpled window,
the millionaire community arrest demonstrating lunatics.
The picador's grotesque mission
passes judgement on nymphomaniac mannerisms.
Holiday draughtsmen wielding cylindrical coffins
rise to the surface of this continuous spermatic baptism,
occasionally removing the erotic temptation with telescopic hammers.
Saints and children are sent off on nursery ships,
to be savaged by primordial hormones out at sea.
Only the glistening luxury of pain can save them now.
A secluded phoenix lurks behind the leper's bed,
laughing at this gestating frippery;
for now the time has come to round up all the nationalists.
But the aerodrome bluntly refuses such a murderous birthday party
on the grounds of strictly biblical concerns.
No palace of love shall flatter this nebular revolution.
The inquisition gyrate around their own controversial policies,
droning on in hopelessly obsolescent language,
while gladiators interview fundamentalist taxidermists
and leeches encounter fugitives from menstrual dreamworlds.
Listening to olden times, the pompous revolutionaries -
their lunar vehicles all decimated now -
turn to painting and diverse forms of sodomy
to provide their sole outlets of creative and kinetic energies.
The future accelerates with every second;
there is no place for labial gymnastics here.
All that remain are the invalid establishment
and the rotting corpses of post-modernist vicars
waiting eagerly for their turn to be castrated.
And, meanwhile, in a different land,
our hero sits and waits,
for soon, he knows,
the fornicators of the world will unite
and save themselves from themselves.
Composed after Tristan Tzara's method of Dada Poetry at the start of 1988.
White stone sits
motionless
pretending not
to notice
passers by and
traffic noise
polluting its
chaste longing
for Nature's
beauty, long
gone from this
urban jungle.
Desperately alone;
a cigarette butt
and bus ticket
are hardly the
most stimulating
conversationalists,
and the white stone
could find nothing
(bar atomic structure)
in common with
the brutally uneven
slabs of stone
on which it lay,
once also part of Nature
until the savage
hand of man
cleaved it from
the very bosom
of the earth.
If only the white stone
had some way of
telling them, the humans,
that their present course
of grotesque consumerist gluttony
will prove fatal;
a fact so obvious
to the white stone
that it shouted
and screamed at
the top of its voice
desperate to be heard
by someone.
(But who listens to the incessant rambling of stones anyway?)
A cluster of
withering trees
sighed a breeze
of sympathy,
yet were sadly
too busy struggling
to photosynthesise their way
through the smog
just enough to
save their species
from extinction, to
bother about the
plight of the humans.
Yet the white stone's cries were not completely in vain; one of the humans, upon passing, instead of giving the stone a good kick, actually possessed the openness of mind to perceive a faint but inaudible sound, or more of an irregularity of air molecules which pulsed a message of surprising clarity directly into the human's brain:
Your race is doomed
unless you divert
from your present
destructive course.Abolish consumerism
Destroy all bureaucracy
Burn all money
Disarm governments
Shed all harmful thoughts
Ignore the Church
Worship Art
Vote for Aesthetics not Politics
Transcend greed
Stop raping the planet
Solve problems
Respect all other lifeforms
Become united individuals,
not rival factions
Live peacefully
Learn everything
Love everyone
Liberate desire
Become oneself.
The newly enlightened human rushed home to write down the Message of The White Stone, before its image faded from memory. Most of the Message was recorded and later published, and the book subsequently enjoyed considerable critical and public acclaim and notoriety, even instigating a powerful new Art Movement which could not have come at a more urgent time for the human race, and which narrowly averted its impending extinction.
1993-11-14 03:28 VP
© copyright Malcolm Smith 2002-02-23 - last updated 2002-11-10