fpf?+13 - Being for the benefit of Thursday night

(written 2 July 2009)

I have a royal chair
It can brush my hair

I have discovered how it is that Radiohead craft their lyrics: They play with their children, and then head off to the studio to write it all down. The lines above are verbatim Caitlin – I sit and brush her hair and she imagines that I am a royal chair. Naturally a song is needed, although as with any good song, it only needs two lines of lyrics repeated over and over and over and over.



Its been a while, as a matter of fact it has been since last year, which is a very very long while. I’d thought it was a few months – there was one in March, but looking back it seems like nothing more than a pitch for birthday wishes. Time knits coincidence out of innocent endeavour. As a variety of little birds may have told you, I have embarked of late on the soul-train of compromise: I am dealing with clients.
A guy came into the office last month – selling encyclopedias. Now I really fucking hate salesmen as much as the next guy, but I recognised the deep unsleeping pain in this person’s eyes, the countercurrent of ill-advice slithering behind every syllable – I too have sold encyclopedias. The only words I have in my defence are these: I sucked. Like an old shoe at the bottom of an abandoned swimming pool. I didn’t sell a single one. All I got from it was a vague memory of a dive somewhere up in the hills around Maritzburg where an Indian dude had a smelly-knick-knack/barber shop called 21 Jump street where me and another guy bought little twists of dope called pencils(?) I really have no hope in hell of even thinking of where to go spelunking to pull out even the vaguest memory of who that other guy was.

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Well I’ve just written this poem and its nice, but I can’t really make head or tail of it. Anyhow, it’ll do til next week…

I waited 18 desert sands
18 oceans deep and still
18 winds wept as I lay
Waiting in the mist
18 mountains crumbled back
To plains of salted stone
And 18 rivers found no sea
and died out overnight
I made a road, a wood, a path
I made a fire and slowly
closed my eyes and went to sleep
to wait refreshed again.

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Anyday now,

Tom