Goodbye New Zealand

Here’s to clean green New Zealand
Here’s to Watkins Dow and agent orange ddt and possum killing as a sport
Here’s to your culture
If it were not for Maori culture you’d have no culture at all
Here’s to race and gender equality
The chicks and the bloody asians applaud your progressive outlook
Here’s to your infrastructure
One train set doesn’t count as a transport service
Here’s to your cardboard houses
Here’s to your weather
On the odd occasion when it isn’t raining the hole in the ozone ensures that you can’t go out during daylight
Here’s to national pride
All black; black fern; tall black; black cocks!
Homo erotic meathead heroes
Here’s to your society of simple farming folk
A nation of landlords exploiting the poor
Here’s to kiwi ingenuity
Tweaking and reinventing the wheel; badly
Here’s to customer service
Pay through your nose no questions asked it’s not my fault
Here’s to the environment
Cut down those trees chainsaw the future
Here’s to bureaucracy
Pay through the nose the mouth and the anus
Pay for the benefit of paying
Here’s to government; National and local
Corrupt cripple and condescending
Here's to all the things I left out

Here’s to the sheep
A true symbol of the nation

Give Me Steel, Give Me Steel

New Zealand's obsessive owners of classic American cars, collectively known as Americarna, descended on New Plymouth for 24 hours of revving, laying rubber on tarmac, excessive waving of the star-spangled-banner, and general showing off

I'm no petrol-head or nostalgist, but these cars are works of grand design.


Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

A Clockwork Orange?

This way...

...and that way...

...to Saratoga...

...de Ville...

...and Dodge.

Cameraman and crew caught on chrome

All photographs © The under-ego of Pisces Iscariot 2007

Through a Glass Half Full

There you go again…
Wading in against the throng of somnambulant crowds
hand-painting silver linings on photocopied clouds
tongue tip protruding like you’re thinking aloud

unmindful of the clues that escape from your notebook
swept away screaming from the mind’s barbed fishing-hook
and dumped in the corner far from your optimist outlook

Doodling in that notebook; telephone crooked shoulder to ear
Listening unhearing to your mother advise cajole and career
Pencil tip scratching out a chiaroscuro floral tear

You lick your lips to whistle an uplifting tune
Perhaps taking your medicine a little too soon
And find yourself breathing dust from the melancholy moon

Dues to be paid in pounds of flesh fresh
Penitent skin to be flayed with wire mesh

Homage to be made to the oracle of silence
Fees to be gathered to provide for the licence

Franchise me; feed me; fill me with fear
Take me to the forum where the experts leer

Through trick hoops aflame and beds a-nail
Smeared in amber grease and essence of snail

Battered and seasoned fried in extra virgin oil
From bent back questioning a poor man’s toil

Through fields fallow with sodden seeds sadly afloat
Across that cold and exclusive intellectual moat

That circles your heart with crocodile crying
Predatory reinforcements now the cavalry’s dying

the never dependable General Custer’s good looks
Have been cut from the pages of history’s books

So you take a deep breath of fetid green air
Arrange your floral hem and descend the glass stair

To the ballroom below where the carnivores wait
…to strip that silver lining from the edge of your plate.

The Past that Suits You Best

The hours are a wind that blows through the heart’s antechamber
Knocking at the vaults where the past is locked away
Blisters and scars bolts of powder burns and bruises blue
Time allows access with shiny plastic security card swiped
To the halls of slipped tongues and thought meander
Allowing the inmates to take over the institute
of suppressed memory and buried hurt
Allowing entrance to those lost continents sunk below
And in negligence wrapped no bows or boas
No carefully captioned records
No witty titled mementoes
Those lost world thirds
With cracked ceramic coats
To ward off the winter chill of remembering
And in cold mud to go digging
With shovel sharp and aged with rust’s rumours
Raise the dead who will not rot
But prefer to fester in the mind’s cold arena
Twisted and torn and of nostalgia born
They rise as yet undead
Clinging synaptic motes of dust
Perhaps hoping for a future in which to flourish
Or a past rewritten…

Pinups #2

“If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.”

Frank Zappa 1940 - 1993

"You've got to be digging it while it's happening 'cause it just might be a one shot deal."

Alchemy Lesson No.9: Soul Mining

The works of last night’s dreams…

Gazing at the future through trick lenses that distort headlines and astrological predictions
through the past’s hard lessons
historians employed by the winning side
little voices nag and loud voices condescend to know where you hang
what makes your world turn
Birds argue incessant in dew laden trees
waking the dead day with cursing nests feathered.

The clouds of morning…
Schizophrenic bed-wetters hiss the tarmac on automatic transmission
raising the relative silence and diving down into the distant city hum
The clouds of morning’s passing…
Fresh coffee excretes itself through sacrificial orifice into glass jar bubbling
The clouds of morning’s passing whims…
The sunrise second hand descends the optimistic side of each minute only to climb inevitably the sheer face of pessimism’s thirty lashes
The clouds of morning’s passing whims heat the afternoon…
Post-midday crises in cliffhanging suspense
waiting for the clock click chop
The clouds of morning’s passing whims heat the afternoon furnace…
Hot word welding logic burn benign
The clouds of morning’s passing whims heat the afternoon furnace where thoughts are forged…

And so to stumble back in head of clouds

The clouds of morning’s passing whims heat the afternoon furnace where thoughts are forged in wonder at the works of last night’s dreams
And so to silent slumber chin and finger tips revealed
There to be hammered on evening’s anvil and shaped by the keen eye of the moon
to be quenched in cold night fears and returned once more to awe

Android Warehouse

At the edge of the wharf you look down into mercury imagining
Reflections of yourself filtered through deep soul mining
In a sea if wet dreaming and cold calculation
your mouth an open book of moral indignation
hitting the ground again, your face to cushion the blow
learning to fly is not all about what you’ve got to show
through righteous indignation and spirit wrenches
to the whistleblowers waiting on green park benches
on the wings of covert foreign black-op adventures
past cowering men in blood filled trenches
through clouds of paranoia and lead weight self-doubt
through mazes and trick doors clearly marked ‘way out’
you follow the hand that seeks to distract the eye
trying to see but hoping-against-hope never to spy
the secret that lurks up those volumous sleeves
like the creatures that rustle under dry autumn leaves
like the eyes of the speaker in spotlight glare
like the secrets revealed in politician stare
like the lies that you wish your mother never told
and the pieces of heart that your sister sold
for comfort in her hour of deepest need
to the man who had drowned in his own damaged seed
waiting forever the bottle level dropping
waiting even after her love came to stop him
So you watch from the wings of your life’s opening night
daring not to venture that close to the light
For fear that your bones might be improperly revealed
Picked over, analysed, the skin from them peeled
And yet it’s by your own light that you are illuminated
Lifted up above the herd and self-incriminated
Your words against you they will gainfully employ
For whom the gods notice they will seek to destroy

The title for this poem is an early Steely Dan demo track. (And later the title of an album containing pre-Steely Dan demos by Becker/Fagen). Android Warehouse was retitled The Halls of Altamira on that cynical work of wonder 'The Royal Scam'