Villon - Johnny Pulp and the Lemonheads
old woman with bags outside Lidl in West Ealing.mp3
Sleeve Notes
What do we survive? Our shame and despair comes to this: all she has to do is ask a kiss, drag me through the shit and the cold street, tread me into the cold ground and beat me black and blue and break my back at will. There's nothing she could do , no kind of ill. She can do whatever and take her fill. Yea I've come to this, I've come to this. She's what I survived after all these fucked up years and I'm as grey and crooked and too old and there's filth in my eye and mind, what appears when I'm naked is disgrace and I'm so cold. All poor, dried up, fold over fold. Not what I was and now just a colossal age too meagre and rank for anyone to hold And my mind's mad is a misery's rage. And where has my smooth croon look gone? I used to arch and be dark dark hair And have a look with glances right to con The canniest girls. And where the rest of me, and what can I pair to intricate and devastate hearts, begin the lament for every part, every dare Now there's nothing but dead skin. This is how we regret the good lost times and end up stupid peevish and old fools crouched over her defeats in the grime a grey heap like a ball of wool round hemp-stalk fire that's gone cool. The fast flame, the faster fall. Ash makes us remember beautiful days and that's it, how it is, one and all. Come on now and take care of me be like the sauciest least friendly friend please. I'm ditched and have no holly willow pollard or tree no shelter from these storms and fate agrees with the gods to exile me . I'm in a deep freeze my girls, you lovers and all the gay things pairing in the antic hey all pricks and darting spurs in dark air guzzling gobs all cascading spray and me poorest Villon, left there. these aren't singers but songs and free only like woods or deeds that please the bums who have no money, no fee all absent and absent minded seize my chance, seize me, I die by slow degrees. here some another sonnet, motet, lay things no wedding breakfast can convey as easily as winds and lightening strikes dare blind you and blindfold eyes from days where poorest Villon, you left him there. You should come to where he lies and see these others who owe no loyalties no tax rent or monarchy unless to your heaven. His fasts are these days throughout the weeks, all weeks, eats cheese breadless washed with cold water. this is his way. His teeth are old and rot and decay He lies on earth all dank and bare no bed no chair hardly a day Poor Villon, will you leave him there? Sisters that live when we are gone dead what will they set against us, too harsh when pity would be best instead then I'll with God go pity you. There's five or six hanging and in view like tolling flesh we used to feed well but now get eaten and we rot and smell and it'll be bones in the cold cold dust fall. What would you? Laugh us to hell? Pray to the gods to save one and all. Sisters if that's even something we said not a disparagement to you even as we hang here hang dead but you should know it how few are women in the sense of what they do. Hold up something now and peer down the well where maybe forgiveness can come or hell in these storms is what you hear as a call. We're the dead. Don't do worse as well. Pray to the gods to save one and all. Here comes rains and dread and we're dead dried out black and blue the magpie gouges from what were once our heads no eyes now, hairs plucked, we're fucked on view with no rest, neither one moment nor two here is another storm and there's a spell the tailor's thumbs less pricked we could tell the needles from the birds. And fall. Don't leave us don't call your cell. Pray to the gods to save one and all. So beautiful girl keep us well beyond this life and beyond hell down there we don't have any business and call to your laughter and what can you tell. Pray to the gods to save one and all. I love and serve her with a fat will and say what you like I'm not mad. See I'd hitch on a fight and go kill and she's all the goods and pleases every one every fad and if there are others I lightly pad to bring whatever, beer, whisky, serve cheese and say it's all cool, come again at your ease like it's like I don't care and never get laid. But I have fine feelings that end and turn ill when she's coming home and I'm had. I can't stand this and her too, like something spills into hate which grabs me by belts and shirts and plaid and fuck it I swear all over. And then add her to my losses and the lonely terrible fees of night. Hands on hips she pleases how I am and how she is , won't be paid and I sign up again whilst I'm on my knees like it's like I don't care and never get laid. I'd make peace in the bed. But she never takes her fill. She's everything beetly and bad and yet I seem to fit the bill. She'd never bang me nor be glad to hurt my thigh and there's nothing we've had cept dead drunk and sleeping like logs with the fleas. It's true all this not screwing brings me to my knees but it's like I don't care and never get laid. here comes the wind and frost and a sort of ease I'm the fucker who never fucks as I please No matter who or what, no matter of degrees layer on layer everything is overlaid. Its a kind of filthed up love unseized which flees honour and honour from me flees where it's like I don't care and never get laid. Bells from the spire they ring silent as you read again and again and here we are, the wind in the night has caught your mind and this is rain coming from a mystery across the sheen from the centre of lives to Ealing green and there's some way our spirit is on the hedge a small bird or something perched on the yew strips us down so we're bleeding by the ledge burn our heart to the alter, the font, arch and pew and what is it you want to say here and now and it's getting real, this is a day. At the pub everything's fire and a blaze you can stop and what is this that clangs out like a tenement and we gaze at the decorations, the lights, where what hangs and when you pass the town hall everything is shouting out and it's a good day. What is it comes into view? Tiger lilies still in flower. Beds of umberelliferae ranged in Betjeman's symmetry this is the sound of love's tower. Kestrels hover coots look over and the valley's happy and curve by the river and we turn to see the slow slow line where we all fell. Hear the mad curlew and it's call coming from a place unforeseen and the strange hidden snipe moving through secret sleet scalding bones winter bone and these are streams yet I wait your acrid lips. You're unwounded like the leader doomed by compassion, all voice and hard as a rock and perpetual. Who are you? Who's sake dies beyond the border and where they bury those who don't believe in death. My bravery is now stupid breath. What seems real are temptations a difficult sort of temptations and no what you think, these operations have no new glory, nothing new. Are you just a visitor come from far and wide looking to see, to see the view what the competitor thinking she will find a hero in my wood far from the capitol. I'm all down and set down by the lost lake looking for an upgrade and wishing to migrate all these thoughts. I'm waiting to the lamps, watch your lights as you pass alive, and go into your house. And here is naked death and a dominion. I have been naked with everyone those in this wind and rain and the great moon the bone and the beast that's not ever gone but is a kind of star and afoot and mad and when will we be sane? I am sinking, and when, when will I rise up again? Lovers are always lost and yet love not but there's always death and it's dominion. Where is this death and its dominion I don't live and love under the sea and lie there longing and dying on something vague that gives way strapped to fate, sinews all broken break. I'm there snapping in two like some evil comes and runs through. What's this that breaks and cracks? He said' death shall have no dominion.' Well fuck: death and its dominion. The gulls scream and die in my ears. Waves are far and on the seashore. I had a lover and then a lover no more. What lifts its head in the rain. All is mad and dead and nails the sky to the earth. hammers like daisies break us. Love breaks us down To where death shall have no dominion. This is the hand that signed and this the one with fingers crossed a city five sovereigns and short of breath doubling like globes of the dead and this place has a way to write to death. The mighty and the sloping shoulder what they can at joints that mark like chalk goose quills in the meadows, parks are where murders put an end to talk. Here's the hand that signed. There's a fever where a kind of famine grew and you came where your hands were other dominions, held over by the writer's scribbling name. We are the ones who count our dead and treat our wounds and mop our brow with hands of pity and hands to heaven we have no tears left to flow. I'm thinking this is something useless and disused five lights and the road are what you face your bags everything, variants of a grace that overwhelms you and leaves the time confused. You're inside a law where what you are cannot be and there's a tough semantics harsh as the winter beauty one of those late days your looks all used. Now you tramp around in that phrase that no one leaves still, between paper bags, the Lidl store through its old door, remembering school where you too were weightless, scentless, strengthless, wholly a child. Try this slowly You were a child once and now you're past and gone. It means when we look at this old woman now and then we know you were beautiful then, and closer and young and vivid and you might still be there among those first days before this, dying again and again in to your shelterless age and poverty and faithfulness but you're losing shape and meaning less with all your hopeless baggage laden. I came here and took a different line and it was early and in the coldest of new years where i stopped to see the traffic, read number plates walked around stations of the cross at gates that were the answers to questions about here. I was far out and looking fr a sign. You were the sign although far from being mine. So long it's been it's not even clear which is which and who creates what we are, where we stand and why departed. It's where the whistle blows and where we went And stars moved and I was stuck in boots and conscious that I was abandoned, no roots only times lost, childhoods unspent and this is it, where I started. By now everything’s mapped and chartered and I write out things but don't invent theologies, philosophies, eat berries and fruits that were perky but old hat a long long time away from family I can't run or cry when depressed these boys are biceps, these girls breasts and are comic and on a farm that could be where they find themselves finding others, like that something in the deep bracken where I never sat I could have been the one where she lay back and became like a burning mist and all poetry's doggerel and abusive and abused and never read and I can't see the difference between pope and mayor No one called me and it was there before us, the gift to see ahead you came down and me to hell like judgment and oh well I supposed nothings really real and said Everything sometimes happens nowhere. Mibu Tadamine wrote since that parting when she had no feelings into the dawn and the moon still shining the light of dawn seemed crueller when a wind blows and the white clouds drift by the crane. Her heart was not so cold. Winter is a lonely hamlet where both grass and leaves wither. The fragrance you asked her by your breast and the petals fall. In the past plovers covered fields and the girl loved so much was a cold cold river and the plovers were crying. I have all the mountains and the mountain spring You have the seasons and travel on. Cuckoos close their eyes to summer nights and wait and one cry marks the dawn. Here the nights spring up and the pathways are not cleared so many leaves have fallen. You're the relic of cherry-flowers and seeds scattered in a storm and I'm waving or that something else. Some days mists rise up like spring and wild geese and moor- hens learn to live without flowers. I conceal everything so badly when they see me they ask if I'm sad about things. I shall pass. You shall walk in long rains and the fade out idle and like lost lustrous flowers. I went to sleep thinking of her and she came in a dream to wake me. Had I known I would not have wakened. Some things tempt bodies like a severed reed rootless and drifting along. Inside as dark as a snow leopard flower. Grass and trees change but waves don't they have no autumn . What doesn't blaze at night but day comes and everything's damped down my heart smoulders. Some trees are crimson and deer haunt the woods and roar out full of passion and the firefly is sadder making no sound the autumn is where the dead and alive mix we sat in the bar like birds in an old nest. Not one of us knew where spring and summer were. we held to timeless gods our secrets. were we setting off or arriving? Goodbye is never the first time journeys are like letters from yourself. the cats are disturbances sheltering us from rain when you live alone. Go-betweens don't always know their role. Marriage asks a price. your face polishes the mirror. Blind drunk feels like spring. Long long ago there's monkey, fox and hare and a bond of friendship. time passed after that. gods watched. is this truth? or the fantasy of a doddering old fool? Flutes and drums paintings and coffee furniture and fish and berries the fox ingenious the monkey dexterous the hare did nothing. So break the twigs said fox and light the fire said monkey and the hare did. Then they hurled her in and served her up. We weep for this. the old man took the hare her death and all hurled her to the moon where his palace glowed and now the hare lives in a palace on the moon our tears on our sleeves. And here is naked death and a dominion. I have been naked with everyone those in this wind and rain and the great moon the bone and the beast that's not ever gone but is a kind of star and afoot and mad and when will we be sane? I am sinking, and when, when will I rise up again? Lovers are always lost and yet love not but there's always death and it's dominion. Where is this death and its dominion? I don't live and love under the sea and lie there longing and dying on something vague that gives way strapped to fate, sinews all broken break. I'm there snapping in two like some evil comes and runs through. What's this that breaks and cracks? He said' death shall have no dominion.' Well fuck: death and its dominion. The gulls scream and die in my ears. Waves are far and on the seashore. I had a lover and then a lover no more. What lifts its head in the rain. All is mad and dead and nails the sky to the earth. Hammers like daisies break us. Love breaks us down To where death shall have no dominion.