POETRY / LYRICS

I was absolutely naked in your personal river Except for my instincts and the shark I knew I had to kill it but I'm not much of a swimmer And my harpoon was never very sharp

You will disappear And I will disappear In a blaze of futile magic In a combustion of desperate dreams Year after year I've spent too many fucking years In a cage of manic Unfounded, unusual fears I was bound for stardom I was infinite when I was new In the corners of ecstasy I clawed at what I thought was true My love was ragged Desperation and cheap mystique Lust and bad habits Chasing after things I thought I could keep All the Gods are perverts They touched me up whilst I was a kid I had to lose everything To find out that the system was rigged I learned about patience I learned how to make myself small I was a giant I studied the Holocaust I tried to make myself pretty I needed a superficial kind of joy I needed someone inside me Like the horse in the siege of Troy My gravestone’s a To-Do List My grandad spent his life at sea My future’s on its way Failed delivery

I know the child of hope Who carved light in the sun Was found twisted in rope Where deviants are hung I know the guardians of trust Had their pensions revoked And their children doxxed And their Dobermann’s choked I know the fey who explored In deep mysteries Were forced to give pleasure Down on their knees I know even the ones Who offered their souls And their ethics to darkness Ended up inside holes

An older man Told me it’s in the detail He didn’t realise I had carved myself out of nothing He’d been to temples To take photographs of my youth He pinned them up Whilst I vowed to abstain from pornography

If equally the world can be divided Then let half go to me, and half go to The Others For I am fair and only require a deathbed And a playground

The only difference Between you and me Is that I am an animal And you are a poem I give you a scrap of meat I give you lines like: Let’s swap cages You die, I’ll be immortal I can imagine shelves You can’t imagine shelves Things like dust Never come into it Perhaps I’ll commission Someone that could have loved me To draw on your front cover An all-knowing bird of sorrow The only difference Is the end of this poem

We mocked 'Spaceman' Counting change with a child's smile He'd lost his mind to astrophysics And now he couldn't buy a paper