They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I’m coming now, I’m coming to reward them
I have been under many huge skies in my time, those beautiful Andalusian ones, the closed in deep ones of my motherland, but none come close to the East Anglian ones. They have a different timbre, a timbre that seeps into your soul. It is hard to explain, worse, there is a colour I can’t describe, a half-light that I have only ever experienced here. It isn’t a twilight colour, though it happens around twilight. It isn’t a blue, it isn’t a red, I imagine it a very colour out of space. I have tried to capture it, but it is more than a wavelength, it seeps into you. Maybe it takes time to see, you need to adjust to the flat, the expanse, the opening horizon.
I’m guided by a signal in the heavens
I’m guided by this birthmark on my skin
I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons
There is a scene, a few fields away from the Gog Magog downs, where the light hits and always draws me in. But for all the years I have tried, I can’t capture an image of what I see. The bending rays defy me to represent it. (Look, it is a criss-cross of leylines down that way, and well, quite.) All angles, nothing works. There is something quietly strange about it, though to others it looks all very ordinary. Given the location, it reminds me very much of a fairy thorn, though a grove rather than a single tree, for a farmer to avoid. I keep thinking I am meant to keep it in my head, and not even try to steal something that is there for everyone.
‘d really like to live beside you, baby
I love your body and your spirit and your clothes
But you see that line there moving through the station?
I told you, I told you, told you, I was one of those
The lights that shine out of the darkness, the old light, that is what I have wanted to capture for myself for as long as I can remember. There is only so much you can see yourself, and so much more you can see with the right equipment, not all of which is tangible. The expansiveness of the unsunlit sky is different, and I never understood why so many ignore it.
Ah you loved me as a loser, but now you’re worried that I just might win
You know the way to stop me, but you don’t have the discipline
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin
And I dream of the Θεῖον Φῶς, it also haunts me, for I have seen it. As my eye gets older, so do the visions that swirl in and around me.
I don’t like your fashion business mister
And I don’t like these drugs that keep you thin
I don’t like what happened to my sister
What my eye can’t see other devices can, and soon I’ll be producing these myself, not using the data others have collected. For human beings are strange, and the act of creation is better than deriving.
And I thank you for those items that you sent me
The monkey and the plywood violin
I practiced every night, now I’m ready
But I have retreated, to books and still images, removed from the world, getting farther and farther from the white heated turmoil of what is now called social media, the incessant chattering and echo-chamber idiocy. I’ll take learning and slow paced life over all that, every time.
I can see everyone fuss around me, over trivial things, like having the latest phone, shouting instant opinions, shouting others’ instant opinions louder as FACT, thinking their gadget/app is the pinnacle of civilisation, and spinning on and on. I sense the onset of age in this, but truth be told, I don’t mind. They are all looking, but none of them see.
Ah remember me, I used to live for music
Remember me, I brought your groceries in
Well it’s Father’s Day and everybody’s wounded
First we take Manhattan
Go chase the light.
Then we take Berlin
