Only Last Summer

(1967)

Long days spent with imaginary friends
in a field of cows obscured by clouds
beneath grey skies and stumbling home
down winding green lanes in the rain
through the mist and loneliness of England
peaking . . . coming down . . . still tripping
staring out a frosted window
tracing patterns drawing faces
in the foggy condensation
while a snake slides through your brain
hypnotic . . . hissing . . . undulating
through a cavern in the darkness
and then out into the dawn
like a dragon swallowing the world
set free at last in a dream last night
its sloughed-off skin inside your head
a grim foreboding you can’t shake
try to ignore but can’t escape
as you hurtle back to town again
on the fast train up to Waterloo
on the Circle Line to Notting Hill
and the underworld of the demimonde
where time stops starts stops starts again
and you’re stranded sea-sick and bewitched
snake-bitten . . . treading water . . . bombed
out of your gourd out of your depth
hoping that no one notices
how scared you are how lost and vain
as you blindly try to feel your way
through the seething crowd of courtesans
and lizard kings and criminals
like dancers at a sacred rite
as the party starts and the feedback howls
and the vampires and the ghosts arrive
and the drunken children wearing masks
in limosines and midnight taxis
grinning giggling wrecked on mandies
spilling red wine dropping acid
everybody’s wearing costumes
nymphs and satyrs gods and demons
cynically disguised as people
blowing kisses eyes distracted
making small talk in the kitchen
dragging you into their sadness
through the corridors and backrooms
and bleak candlelight crescendos
of a dream house sick with music
empty mirrors and confusion
and the stench of smouldering carpet
and the crackling of a fire
in which smashed bits of furniture
and manuscripts and torn up books
and an old guitar you really loved
consumed by wicked hungry flames
like memories of better days
keep turning into smoke
and blowing away
like everything must in the end
the child inside your head explains
as a great snake glides across the room
out through a door into the night
and you follow it you know you must
and stagger out onto the lawn
with your head craned back and your arms spread wide
staring high into the sky
through a crack between two broken clouds
where the moon and one bright planet drift
suspended in the void of space
as a voice inside your head intones
all movement is accomplished now
and the land in silence stands and weeps
and the sky above is crystal blue
and you understand that the end has come
for the world you’ve hated with such love
and raged against and struggled with
like a fly caught in a spider’s web
has turned its face away from you
and your muse has fled back to her hill
and all your harps have been unstrung
and there’s nothing left to say or do
but walk away just walk away
while your heart breaks open
and pours out
destroyed by beauty at the last
one final time
forever
yeah yeah
yeah

.

“All movement is accomplished in six stages
and the seventh brings return”
— Syd Barrett, Chapter 24

Basically a late night guitar solo

Embodying the modernist myth of sorrow suffered into art, he sank through quicksand storms of shame into the dark. Desire is a lonely cry: sand through the fingers, gritted teeth. Denial is a golden wall. Behind this wall a garden grows, with a fountain in it, and a tree. Upon a high branch, claws sunk deep, obscured by foliage and flowers, a silver bird with human eyes sings hauntingly of life and death in measured and melodic tones as mindless as a chiming bell, as meaningless as blasphemy. Its lonely song is a wall as well, raised to contain what it keeps out. These walls loom over everything.

But day is over, night has come. In silhouette a shadow stands, behind drawn curtains, staring down. Surf breaks upon a pebbled beach. In the meadow all is calm and still. As darkness swallowing the earth spreads posthumously from within, the realms and cities of mankind lost deep inside it glimmer faintly like a nest of tiny lights. Seen from above, seen in a dream. A meteor burns through the sky.

From height to height, borne on the shock of stubbornly repressed desires made flesh and tearing loose like bats, the fury caged inside a man, who was a boy once, who got lost, sprouts wings and soars into the sky, abandoning humanity for something purer and undying on the far side of the wall, where vision is embodiment and bodies merely rags of thought. This is the song of Icarus. It never changes, never stops.

Across a wild and painless sky the birdman soars on eerily, evaporating as he climbs closer and closer to the sun that melts the wax that binds his wings and sends him plunging, plummetting into the sparkling, heaving cauldron of the sea.

A god is swinging from a tree upon an island of white bones. A raven perches on his skull. The sea is black. The stars have fled. The sun is burning like a bush in some bleak, desecrated waste as silence dawns. The roaring stops. In silhouette a shadow glides towards the wood of suicides, and stones are falling from the sky, as the birdman in his burning house, in his haunted tree, trapped in the roof, screams out a woman’s name at last.

Above creation his cry sounds like a faceless, incandescent shriek that pierces her and lifts her up on waves of loneliness and grief and unassuaged desire and love, that paradoxically somehow, calls comfort down like healing balm, while the birdman beats his wings against the beams.

Fishing Port

From bridge to bridge, beneath the moon
a river flows and opens out
into a harbour. Ships and wharves
knock hollowly together
as the tide begins to turn.

Fear like a form of sentient fog
a cold and predatory throng
prowls through the twisting winding streets
on which each house in every row
seems like a crudely fashioned face
with lighted windows shining bright
for eyes, and bolted doors for mouths.

Brisk footsteps echo in the dark
and fade away. A tug boat’s horn
calls mournfully across the water
like an animal in pain. It wails!

Behind each face, in lonely rooms
warmed by the glow of shaded lamps
the fogbound town’s inhabitants
feel fingers plucking nerves that sing
as ancient serpent energies
pour subtle lightning down the spine
and lights go out behind closed eyes.

Sleep is a terrifying place
where nightmares roam. The ancient hunt
swoops over ridges, down straight paths
by still ponds that reflect the moon
across a landscape in the skull
that has not changed since Man was young.
Death is a promise always kept.

From bridge to bridge, through banks of fog
the river flows and opens out
into a harbour. Ships and wharves
knock hollowly together
as the tide begins to turn.

Funhouse

The black tar street is strangely lit
Harsh smoulders in the afterglow
Of words flung head high words like fists
Like fires lit in the wilderness
Harsh crackles underfoot the leaves
A child ran trampling through the woods
One lost and smoky afternoon
Harsh blisters in the memory

In silence ever deepening

An afternoon of fear and dread
When childhood woke into youth
And found it much worse than childhood
As dreamlike but not half as good
Reduced to wanting what it got
To taking what was always there
The child grew green then golden brown
Then cold winds blew it to the ground

In silence ever deepening

A sheet of paper blackens curls
Up at the corners brightens burns
Ash lifted on the updraught soars
And vanishes: that place again
Through the terrifying day by day
Reality of what it means
In childhood or youth to live
And love in fear from fire to fire

In silence ever deepening

Harsh blasts of hatred crash against
A woman’s face in a lonely place
That place again: of mindless rage
Of her disgrace and violation
O forgive! forgive! forgive!
It is his drunkenness not him
But the black tar street is strangely lit
And she must walk the length of it

In silence ever deepening

Ten city blocks and three hours away
In the crumpled bed on which they’d lain
Naked and harmless and just playing
Like children on that same sad day
She finally gets to sleep at last
While an intimate new enemy
Lies in her arms uncoiled and strong
Awake and ticking all night long

In silence ever deepening

He looks at her and feels no love
Feels nothing that can help her now
For he remembers everything
Each sinking step along the way
That brought him to this evil place
The lies she told the traps she laid
He runs a finger down her chin
And draws the sheet down past her knees

In silence ever deepening

She stirs and wakes alone with him
At the bottom of a deep blue sea
In the underwater light of dawn
At a little after 6:00 a.m.
As a door swings open into hell
In the sour smelling upstairs room
Of a boarding house on Moore Park Road
On the morning of Thursday, March the 4th

In silence ever deepening

He’s waiting for the cops to come
And trying not to think too much
About what he’s done about what he did
With her melted head in his burning lap
And the memories that kept flashing back
Delirious! ecstatic! frantic!
As the knife tore through her body
And the blood sprayed on the walls

In total silence

Sleeping Beauty

Black sea, still sea
of silent water
lapping gently at the docks.
White porticos and files of columns
stretching up the gentle slopes
of Tiplic, like a lifeless forest.
Vertigo cliffs soar beyond.

Long wooden ships, sails hanging limp
float on the harbour motionless.
No wind. The sun is rising dark
and fiery red far out to sea
yet no one wakes. The dream rolls on
wave after wave back to the mountains
in the slowly purpling west.

Red flowers
on their snow-capped peaks
like blood on teeth.

The streets are empty, every house
has fallen silent: birds and beasts
like people sleep, while roses bloom
in every hearth, each frozen heart
unearthly beautiful and strange
blood-red and poison-briared and twisting
through each window, every door.

Dead centuries pass in the gap
between one held breath and the next
as the dream rolls on, flows on.

Into the Mystic

—Can I ask you something?
—Sure, I guess.
—It’s just, you know. Why do they call you Titblisters, for God’s sake?
—I dunno. They just do. They always have.
—But it’s not your real name is it?
—I dunno. Yeah. Probably. Should I take my clothes off now?
—Okay.
—Only if you want me to, mate. I mean, don’t get too excited.
—Yeah. Yeah, I do. I do want to see you naked, but—
—But what?
—I just don’t want to have to keep calling you Titblisters. I really don’t. No offence.
—None taken.

[...]

—So, uh, what do you want to call me then? Do have some special name that gets you going, or what?
—Not really. Um . . .
—Right. Fair enough. Look, my brother used to call me Juju when we were kids. How would that work for you?
—Juju? Yeah, okay. That’s good. But how about Jooj? Would that be all right?
—I really don’t care, honest. I just want to get this over with.
—Okay. I mean, “Okay, Jooj.”
—Yeah, right.

[3 minutes later]

—Oh, Titty-tit-tit-tiblisters! Oh, yeah! Waauugh! Ugh-ugh! On ya, Tits! Oh! Ooooh-ooh-ughh-owowow . . . uuuuuuuuh.
—You see?
—Sweet Jesus . . .
—Right, then. I’ll be off.

A Brand New Day

(excerpted from “Class Notes: the busy child’s guide to future history”)

From one perspective mankind’s present journey, of which we are so proud and humble and glad to be a part, began in the deep past, almost one thousand years ago, as a despairing but nonetheless epic attempt to undo the consequences of what made it possible in the first place: high speed interstellar transportation, the error prone development of which had resulted in the extinction of all life on Earth.

Carelessness, presumably drug assisted, led to an elementary miscalculation at a crucial stage of the ill-fated Final Test Launch #5, which in turn set off a series of chain reactions that escalated apocalyptically in nanoseconds. The oceans steamed dry and the air itself broke down to plasma as planetwide temperatures briefly peaked at solar surface levels. Nothing remained afterwards but slag.

Had the disaster been less total, a violent backlash against the sciences would surely have been inevitable. Instead the hopes of the few off-world survivors were inextricably linked with biotech, AI, and astrophysics, effectively forever.

In the weeks and months that followed the death of their world, the surviving remnants of mankind regrouped on the moon, Mars, and various orbital stations. Fortunately, the artificial intelligence on which survival depended was distributed throughout the inner solar system, so the network was able to recover from the loss of its main drives and return to fully operational status almost immediately. Of course there were huge chunks of memory missing. But then, so much was missing. Earth was gone.

Nonetheless, technics and experimental science forged ahead into a tainted, bitterly ironic, new golden age of discovery. “If the environment can no longer support you, buy a new one or build your own,” had long been a rallying cry for psychos in the turbulent decades leading up to the catastrophe. Now it was the only hope for mankind. Over a relatively brief span of no more than two or three generations, highly disciplined, machine-directed, hysterically obsessive research efforts eventually came up with a large number of elegant and occasionally workable solutions to many of the problems it had caused.

The single most pressing of these was shelter. How could humanity survive in deep space, and on the hostile surfaces of worlds unfit for life? The development of hermetically sealed, durable, self-sustaining living spaces had long been a major priority, and had evolved in tandem with interstellar flight. Indeed, dependably robust living pods (“People Often Died Slowly”) were already theoretically viable, if rarely so in practice, when The Disaster struck. And soon they were a functioning reality. Entirely self-sufficient, self-regulating, self-contained artificial biospheres, typically consisting of a nucleus and up to a dozen secondary stems, these chancy, unpredictably lethal post-environmental podworlds would eventually give what was left of Adam’s seed the option of populating the farthest reaches of the galaxy.

Several lifetimes and countless horrors later, the first truly flightworthy near-light speed ships managed to exit the solar system without detonating.

The diaspora was underway.

And as the decades and slow centuries passed, these first few scattered ships became unnumbered vessels, entire fleets and floating cities of interconnected pods, looping and spiralling away in all directions from the sad charred corpse of Earth.

And that’s about it really. Hopping from system to system, from star to star, humanity spread out like a shock wave or the common flu into a completely disinterested wider universe, into the Great Alone.

Figures in a landscape

The day is clear, but for a low bank of cloud on the horizon, hovering unobtrusively above the roofs of the town and the medieval spire of its cathedral. I am reminded of a painting I adored when I was young.

The foreground (of this particular painting) is a rounded hillside in northern Europe, an airy, open space, where grasses sway as winds pass by. The sky is huge above us. We are small.

A hawk slides by high overhead. It too is tiny, distant, a mere speck lost in the blue. When I point it out to you, you smile, and clasp my happy hand in yours. So we walk on. Silence has swallowed us. We are strolling on the bottom of an ocean of cool air.

Below us is a little stream that winds along the valley floor. This is all happening as if underwater, slow and hushed. We head downhill.

(But in another lifetime, we kick up. We use our powerful broad fins, and rise towards the shining surface, swiftly, seeming to be soaring.)

Then we’re there.

Once upon a time in the 18th century

A hawk hangs high above the sun
on wide wings gliding.
Whispers, mutterings below.
Leaves in the forest like green tongues.
The rustle of soft fabric
and the pale blue ache of dawn.
Hoofbeats. The song of morning birds.
A finger to her lips, a sigh.
Stained windows bled through by dim light.
Dark hair. Salt beads of sweat like pearls.
The thundering of iron hooves.
Bolt lightning memories. Footsteps on the stairs.
Fists battering an oaken door.
A candle’s tossed flame, shadows flung.
Flags fluttering beneath a storm wracked sky.
Horses and hounds and servants dressed in red.
White curtains billowing, darkness inside.
A stifled cry.
Two gunshots in the wood behind the stream.
Smoke on the wind: flame light
reflected wildly in mad eyes.
Silver and stone. Carved ivory and bone.
Cold water sluicing down.
Down in the flood, down endlessly.
Each moment lasts a thousand years.
Blood in the stream.
All gone, all gone.
All turning into dust and blowing away.
Lost feathers, rusted leaves.
Pale bare feet on a cool green lawn.
Dew and desire, desire and mist.
Full lips, bruised lips
and probing tongue.
There is no way to get back
there from here.
Wildflowers in her hair.
Blood on her hands.
O, love, the sundering! Harsh raven caws
like ghostly voices hauntingly
aloft, lost in the ice and granite
of impossibly blue air.
Then rain for hours, days, cold rain.
A watercolour sun. Grey clouds.
Twelve mourners dressed in black beyond the hill.
A carriage drawn by four white horses.
Bagpipes skirling, keening, swirling
through the tumbled stormy air all afternoon.
Trees in a fog.
Still waters. Memory undone.
Wildflowers in her hair. The sound of rain.
Ice water heavy in her lungs. Blue lips, white vampire skin.
It’s done. It is accomplished now.
There is no way to get back there from here.

Shriek! Shriek! Shriek!

In a world of woeful women
and unhappy, desperate men
I wandered long dark tunnels
on the tracks of a long gone train.

I saw the man I might have been once
and the boy that I once was
with a woman who’d been crying
in the kitchen of a house

perched on the edge of a crumbling cliff
on the cold and lonely heights
where everything is frightening
and nothing turns out right

because the man feels trapped and guilty
and the woman feels betrayed
and the boy just sits there quietly
while the words fly round his head

and no one’s ever satisfied
and nothing gets resolved
it just keeps getting worse and worse
and the cracks get wider and the paint peels off

and there’s broken glass on the kitchen floor
and a smoke alarm going in my skull
that wails and bleeps and howls and screams
and keeps on getting louder and won’t stop.