Monday, March 11, 2013

Please Talk About Me

Please talk about me when I'm gone
Please enlist my ghost into that ghoulish troop you're driving on
Into the teeth of enemies that must be hunted down
Into the face of dangers besetting all
In the greater good please talk about me when I'm gone

Please talk about me if awareness seems too scarce
Please press-gang my battered corpse onto your flagship
Sailed to colonise the dark continents of man
Let my name ring out on every sea
For civilisation's sake please talk about me when I'm gone

Please talk about me when my memory is too keen to even see
Please take my blurry image and plaster it on poles
Let the people see how much I mean
To hear in death what I can bring
So I do some good please talk about me when I'm gone

Please talk about me if you're worried I'm a waste
Don't let my life be squandered on its own small, petty facts
Let friends and family come to honour
The symbol they knew once upon a time
If all I ever was is not nothing you must talk about me when I'm gone

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Snow

Longing for snow I'm panting and gasping
Under a sun that's been trying to kill me for days
In every dark corner I'm chased and harassed
By the heat that won't take no for an answer

So I'm longing for snow, for the sharp bite of cold
For a frantic desire to put on a long coat
I'm praying for ice to crunch under my feet
For a wind that blows through me and chills every bone

Blinded by sweat in my face's every creekbed
Nose burnt red by summer, not whipped red by cold
I'm longing for snow that won't answer my calling
Dreaming of winters a world's road from home

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Let Him In

Let go
Let go of your earthly desires and material possessions
Let Jesus in
Let Jesus take your hand
Let Jesus hold you
Let Jesus kiss you
Let Jesus run his hand quietly up your thigh
Let Jesus in
Let Jesus take you home
Let Jesus ask you upstairs
Let Jesus slip something into your drink when you're not looking
Let Jesus fill you with his sweet love
Let Jesus collapse in a fetid sweaty heap on your back
Let Jesus rub your face in the wet spot and email the video to your parents
Open your heart and feel the holy spirit!
Let him in!
Let Jesus be your reach-around!

What would you do

What would you do
If I told you that I loved you more than breath
What would you do
If I told you I would follow you until death
Would you stand up and scream at me, slap my face and say you want to see me dead?
Because honestly
That seems like quite an extreme reaction.

What would you do
If I came home one night
Bleeding from a head wound I received outside Hungry Jack's?
Would you take off all your clothes and hungrily lick the blood from my forehead?
Because honestly
That would be really disturbing

I've got to be honest
I find you very unpredictable
Sometimes it seems I don't know you at all
Especially when I consider
That I have never actually met you
You're just a girl I once saw in a food court

I don't really know where I'm going with this
It would probably sound better
If I knew how to play the piano
I could have had lessons, but I chose instead to play soccer
Which was a mistake because when I was 12
I was sexually assaulted by the rest of my team

What would you do
If I told you I loved you more than I loved being sexually assaulted by a soccer team?
Would you take it as a compliment, or would you spit in my face and try to bite off my arm?
What's wrong with you anyway?

What would you do
If I told you I loved you more than some hot chips in a bag?
I mean the chips are in a bag, I don't mean I love you in a bag
But if you were in a bag, I would love you
I would love you in a bag, or a box, or a thermos
But what would you do?
Would you say, even with chicken salt?
I would say yes, even with chicken salt and you know how much I love chicken salt
Would you appreciate that?

Or would you simply shoot me in the head and take my wallet?

I certainly hope not, for that last one.

There She Goes My Beautiful World (for Nick Cave)

I wanna tell you you're my world
I'm not just saying that because you're roughly spherical
I'm not just saying that because you weigh over 5 septillion kilos
I'm not just saying that because you complete a full rotation every 24 hours

I'm saying it because I want to explore you
I want to climb your hills
I want to dive to the bottom of your seas
I want to negotiate treaties between your face and ribcage
I want to test Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles on the backs of your knees

I don't know what that means, but I want to find out

Because you're my world
Even though you walked all over me
Even though you crushed my heart
Even though I don't know what you were thinking that day when you walked into my life, clad head to toe in yellow rubber, barking incessantly in Norwegian

And for the next few months we were lost in the fever of our hearts
Telling each other those little reassuring things that lovers tell each other
Things like, "You're beautiful"
"You complete me"
"You'd be the perfect woman if you weren't so racist"

You knew how to push my buttons then but it seems now you've forgotten
So let me remind you:

WITH YOUR FINGERS

So you left
And it was after you left that I first met Nick Cave
At a Weird Guys In Black Anonymous meeting
And 24 hours later we were sharing a one-bedroom beach shack in Tahiti
And those were happy days
But as the Bible says, man cannot live by angry tropical gothic sex alone

We walked together down a dusty, hell-blighted road
Sharing a Golden Gaytime
And he told me a story, he said:
I met an old man on this very road, coat made of coyote skin, eyes like coals, and said, let me tell you about a woman I once knew, who said, Once, I knew a boy...

And I said wait, are you telling me a story about a man telling you a story about a woman telling him a story
And Nick Cave said yes, it's meta-fiction

And I saw the opportunity I'd been waiting for, and I smiled and said, I've never meta-fiction I didn't like

And with that Nick Cave took a piece of wood and beat me viciously for three hours straight
And I spent the next 5 years learning to walk again

All for you!
Because I remembered how much you used to like watching me walk
You used to say, walking is God's greatest gift to man
And I said, what do you mean?
And you said, man used to have to crawl along the ground with aching fingers and chafed nipples
Until God gave men legs as a reward for passing his tae-kwon-do exam

And I said, that seems to be a point of view not grounded in accepted biblical tradition
But I don't mind
Because when you tell it, and I look into your eyes
You remind me of a Nick Cave song
A good one
Not one of the weird ones
Probably the one with Kylie
Yeah
When I look into your eyes you remind me of a song about killing a girl with a rock

Because you're my world
And not because you're covered in ice at the top and bottom, and hot round the middle
And not because you're inhabited by thousands of species of beetle

But because when I'm drifting through space, passing all the planets
You're the only one who can give me oxygen

And when it comes to committing to a long-term relationship
I consider a girl who won't kill me by asphyxiation to be
The bare minimum

My beautiful, beautiful world