Radical Love

Radical Love

Whatever’s ringing in my ears
Seems to be getting nearer
The last song ever played on the radio
A broadcast from the future
Telling us all to get out
When there’s nowhere to go

The detective shows I enjoyed
Now tell me death created time
To grow the things
It will later destroy
And what matters to us most
Will die and come back as ghosts
But now

We’re gathering all our things together
Preparing for this new kind of weather

As they alternate truth with fire

And burn our love to the ground

You’ll write about it sometime

Just not while you are here

Now you’ll keep the party line

And alternate truth with fear

Don’t believe what they say
When the powerful have left us bereft
We won’t be caught up in
A storm of murder and theft
We’ll be holding each other up
And sharing out what’s left
But for now

We’re gathering all our things together
Preparing for this new kind of weather
As they alternate truth with fire
And burn our love to the ground
So now it’s fine to be a fucking liar
The stakes were high but we were higher
Singing ‘we don’t need it, we don’t need it
We don’t need to know’
But we can’t hide, we’re all on the same ride
We’ll try to ride it slow, til it blows

New Kind of Weather

A love like slanted light revealing all that’s broken
With illuminated anger and hearts that are wide open
A love always reaching outward and telling us to be kind
A love in forests alive with synapses of mind

A love that rattles in the throat and lights up the features
Of axolotls, ocelots and other unlikely creatures
A love that can be heard in the song of raspy saxophone birds
A love in your wild eyes, bleeding lips, and half formed words

We belong together, all us here right now
Never fearing the other, always reaching out
With the mind of a fox and heart of a dove
I’ll face this world with a radical love

A love that understands our trauma and aids our revival
Stops the cortisol from ruining the meat of our survival
A love that beats the mottled drum skin of the moon
Rings out in dive bars and in doctors waiting rooms

Never Danced So Much

I’m not gonna live forever by these words
For now you are a fever
A spirit who entwined with mine
Fucked me up, fucked me into the future
Struck down the tower yet still we survive
Among the mycorrhizal networks
Keeping this heart beating wild and alive

You walked into my life
Carrying the warmth of a distant fire
My breaking song took flight
It rung out in joy, pain and desire
I’ve never danced so much
I’ve never cried so much
I’ve never been so destroyed
By a woman’s touch

Your hands are charged by some dark arts
Slide your fingers in my mouth and I am yours
Shape shifter in the night;
Lion’s mane, gecko spine and raven claws
Black cat weaving through open door
Disappearing into the morning
With blood dripping from her jaws

When your eyes flashed gold my heart was repaired
Other times they were cold
And snow drifts settled in as you stared
Like at the station when you said goodbye
You tore the paper moon right up
And it fell out of the sky

Track 04

Red River

Up close to the source, the start of this course
He’s lay on the grass, his fingers draped in the water
His wound leaking blood into the river
Right into the bones of his daughters

In the darkness something glows, dancing down beneath the surface
Maybe some revelation that his girls don’t deserve this
Or maybe lightning scars reflected from above
Tearing around up there and breaking up the canopy of love

But red buds falls as if nothing at all
Could fill us with fear and the water runs clear
No trauma no tide of our tears

Night falls river flows black and blue
‘Til the moon shines her soft light in the darkness I find you
Riding a starving mare with a thousand yard stare
I call out ‘where are you going?’ and you say ‘I’ll meet you there’
Where the children play at the entrance to the ocean
Where I find you on the shore fixing everything that’s broken
Sometimes I feel I’m drowning, sometimes floating

But red buds falls as if nothing at all
Could spoil this sunrise, that’s when I realised
That this dream odyssey was just
A flash through the fog of my brain
But it did so much to explain to me
Why my tears run red sometimes

Track 05

Snaggletooth

Pressed ear to tree to hear it speak
Then asked my friend to do the same
The voice I heard went silent
And she grew tired of this game
I was left alone to bark and howl
In the corner of the playground
To roll on the rubber floor
To run swift like a wolfhound

Holding chicks with hen pecked bleeding feet
Sorrow and joy sped up to child’s time
The rising spring, my fallen spirit
Sometimes crushed me, sometimes chimed

In bed at night my wild love brought apocalypse
A blackbird trapped inside my heart
Her desperate song on my lips
It’s still a part of me
It’s still a part, that’s the truth
It’s still a part of me
This kid with a snaggletooth

Bought Tipex, a fake leather jacket
Wrote clash city rockers on the back of it
I joined the ranks of the old punks
To be thrown around in the most pit
I rose up from the fires of rock and roll each night
My fragile body bruised and blazing with light

And the flames tore through
The haunted corridors of my mind
Illuminating my chalked out plans
My buckling beams and my fault lines
And my demons dance on
Through these burnt out halls
I hear their ghostly whistling
Bouncing off the crumbling walls

We waited a really long long time
To find out what was going on
In this troubled little mind
Who knows what it is

Track 06

Lightning Held

Our wounds burn like torches and reveal as we delve
How our blood heals the most damaged part of ourselves
We swim in dark waters ‘til my defences are undone
Through the jolted choreography of my tongue
Welding the metal of my heart to the flesh of my words
While silence is breaking in the throat of the birds

She’s charged with the wild magic of the universe
Her hair a bleached crest, her fingers covered in earth
And I’m in trouble again, I’m in trouble again

Her eyes are like lightning held in the moment of striking
The shape of our love shifts under different lighting
Disco balls and glitter or grey skies outside
The bedside lamp swimming in my tearful eyes
Naked and entwined a heron flies into the night
A snail sings up to a star, a fox skips through the moonlight

Hold the torch to the moment
Allow ourselves to be scorched
By the moment

Track 07

Fire In The Well

Lions prowl out on the astral plane, stars dance like a ‘40s Miro
Fiddle player folds his map, scratches a tune out of a weeping willow
I raise my palms, a dying bird falls in my hands
My fingers tremble as they know something that I don’t understand

Like fire, like fire, like fire down deep in the well
Like fire, like..

Before I think about it take me up to the heart of life
and into the dark night, and oh won’t you hold me tight

Owl cries, a cracked skull, she is bleeding in her nest
Her silky red wing dripping down beside her quivering chest
Now she’s a bullet shot to the sky fields fade from view
Her Shadow Self whispers behind her ‘Fly high, this world’s too cruel’

Track 08

Let The Tree Sing

The roots shook a sound rose from the soil
The grinding chord that birthed it all
And this is my response to the call;
A guttural cry soaked in alcohol
That breaks your mosaic vase
And the shards light up like terrified stars
The fallen flowers lie wheezing
Hold an orchid to your ear
To check that it’s still breathing
And all I think of as the stem palpitates
Is we always destroy
what the earth tries to create

There’s a voice that we barely hear
It’s speaking much too fast
It has warnings from the future
But it was never asked
Blood gathers in its branches
Words choked in inner rings
Silence the engines
And let the trees sing

All that it knows is all that we have
Wandering around
All that it knows is all that we have
Wandering around
So tell me now...

The sunlight through the window
Suddenly feels much too strong
Like a smile that lingers
For a little too long
So we close the curtains
And gather the pieces
Then fall to the floor
With no light between us
As the gears wind our clambering bones
Iron bars screeching, industrial groans

Track 09

Deep Sea Creatures

I look back at our home as a spectacle of sea creatures
Dancing through deep waters
A frantic creative space, other worlds shimmer through this place
We’re living wild and lawless

Oh creature of the deep
don’t try to terrify
Light up like I know you do
when it’s just me and you

Recent affairs on the surface dance with auklets up above
Right down beneath all this the deep waters of our love
My god I miss our home but I can’t go there anymore
As unreachable as the magic of the ocean floor

I watch as the sea freezes over
I walk out on the ice and it breaks open
I fall right down to the bottom of the ocean
To find it empty with all the magic gone

As I freeze as I’m dying
the creatures of our home fade out of sight
Cats stretched out on the balcony
Watching the trains as you write