Met a guy at the Electric Banana
who offered me a part in his
movie;
maybe waiting tables, an extra in
a
courtroom scene, a lonely
novelist.
I asked what he wanted from me;
I want answers, he said. I
want truth.
We are all middlebrow now,
in thrall to he said she said,
the touchable worlds of love,
whether imagined or illicit,
or sometimes even true.
Someone should write this
down; we may be touched by
the significance of small things.
Welcome to the extravaganza;
Hollywood in a Glasgow studio,
a man with a thousand voices,
none of them his own, and yet
all of them. Parliamo
Tinseltown,
parliamo the lingua
franca of joy.
A book is the best way
to travel; a paperback
is a seat in First Class,
a gold card. Live a life
you could never afford,
where nothing is perfect
but everything balances
at the turn of a final page.
Wind lifts the tin roof
on a forgotten cantina
down by the border.
A couple dance
by the jukebox.
A voice like aƱejo
carries over the desert;
please let her know
that I’m well.
What if we could make our
buildings dance,
screw them up like rejected
blueprints, fold
their planes into curves and
corrugations?
It might be possible to twist
dreams inside out,
and turn these meditations into a
metropolis.
They put a band together for you -
guitar, bass, drums, keys - tight,
and sharp, all the right moves,
like thunder, lightning, all new
licks made entirely out of light
by the Colonel of the groove.
There is a factory by the Thames
where men are wrought from iron,
a number branded into their back,
a dream of Saturday beaten into
a breastplate with an old hammer.
There is nothing as dramatic
as an idea; who will speak it?
Who will speak against it?
Who will be changed by it?
The idea sleeps in the pen of
its writer, and only awakens
when it is time to be spoken.
This season we’re all in catsuits,
stitched from skins of dead punks
and supermodels, bought from a
boutique on a dead-end street.
We know style moves on; till then
we’ll wear our art on our sleeves.
Sit tight and listen keenly;
a sweet sound from the yard,
neither dread nor dancehall,
the sound of the flowing river
we all must cross someday.
You lived at ground zero, where
the sound of a city drowned out
every other song in the world,
where a bassline could crumble
suburbs to dust, and to survive
meant you were made of stone.