Song Stuff & Song Lyrics

                                          Song Stuff

                      Sex

I don’t have much of an opinion

about lyrics or raps or poems

about sex.

I mean,

sex is fun;

sex feels good;

sex is dangerous.

That’s not headline news.

Anything else?

     Particularly Destructive Earworms

When I turn off all my music

just to listen to the rain

my disappointment’s bitter

if some pop song from long ago enters my head,

even if I liked it then,

as this fucks up a situation

with an enormous potential

to become a spiritual experience

 – or at least to provide the illusion of one,

which would truly be just as good.

It’s even worse,

of course,

if the tune’s some load of crap

that I never could stand

in the first place.

                                  Song Lyrics

          (Feel free to compose your own tunes to these)

                 Sally Says

I don’t care what Sally says

She jabbers on about her rules

in her not-quite tiger-striped minidress

for having a laugh at random fools

Smokes a brass hookah whilst wearing a fez

I don’t care what Sally says

I don’t care what Sally says

Sally B-girl

Sally thighs

Sally play-the-game

Sally wise

I don’t care what Sally says

I don’t care what Sally says

All her air points mean jack shit

Her words are empty when she says yes

You’re in the desert; she has a fit

telling stories of the Sea of Cortez

I don’t care what Sally says

Do you care what Sally says?

I don’t care what Sally says

               Untidy Camellia

Untidy Camellia

you’ve scattered your petals all over the place ―

Cross-wearing Russians

prefer tidy plastic imitations

that shed nothing into their narrow spaces.

Aggressive Old Rosie

you keep invading the neighbours’ clothesline ―

Turquoise-covered Navajos

see into the spirits of rocks

in drylands wracked by coal mines.

Pong-Bombing Jasmine

you last like a love affair ―

Badge-wearing bullies

frenzied by the scent

of gunpowder and blood,

flail about, just above nowhere.

Tart Musky Magnolia

you’re shady whilst you’re shedding

you shed whilst you’re shading ―

Choker-wearing countesses

canter off into the sunshine,

mindless of where they’re heading,

respectable desperados fading

away.

                    Leaving Opotiki

He crawls in gravy

She sings in fear

They both ram-a-lam to the watcha-doo

They’re leaving Opotiki to someplace new.

She wears pig-grease in her hair

He speaks in pain

Then they re-bop the snooggy-woo

They’re leaving Opotiki for someplace new

Ruddy sunshine sugar pop

Maddie’s boyfriend is a cop

whaddah-fuddah shooggie farm

Opotiki shit – unlucky charm

Opotiki shit – unlucky charm

Maybe Tauranga

Maybe the bush

Back in the mountains, green as blue

All we could say

All we could say

We’re leaving Opotiki for something new.

               Grey Paradise

Grey Paradise Grey Paradise

     (grey paradise grey paradise)        {Rondo}

Grey Paradise Grey Paradise

     (grey paradise grey paradise)

Can be painful, can be nice

Grey Paradise Grey Paradise

I love the spider on the wall

I love the tweeting of the mice

I’ve felt the pride before the fall

Right here in Grey Paradise

Grey Paradise Grey Paradise

     (grey paradise grey paradise)        {Rondo}

Grey Paradise Grey Paradise

     (grey paradise grey paradise)

Sometimes lonely, sometimes nice

Watch out watch out – Grey Paradise

Accountants punching up the sky

They’re keeping warm, they know the price

The homeless queuing up for pie

Taking their time – Grey Paradise

Grey Paradise Grey Paradise

     (grey paradise grey paradise)        {Rondo}

Grey Paradise Grey Paradise

     (grey paradise grey paradise)

It’s not the place for your device

It fills things up – Grey Paradise

Grey Paradise Grey Paradise

     (grey paradise grey paradise)        {Rondo}

Grey Paradise Grey Paradise

     (grey paradise grey paradise)

Sometimes it’s best not to think twice

You’re all alone – Grey Paradise

Grey Paradise Grey Paradise

             Shell Shocked

Shell SHOCK

Shell shocked Elsmere

House all gone

Shell SHOCK

Shell shocked Foggy Bottom

Skeletons of public buildings

Shell SHOCK

Shell shocked Aspen – you’re done

All my life I’ve run

Will my old streets go crumbling

into ruins?

Shell SHOCK

Shell shocked Inland Empire

Fire raging out of control

Shell SHOCK

Shell shocked Echo Park

Militia battles in the street

Shell SHOCK

Shell shocked Oxford – you’re done

I wouldn’t get a gun

Hungry gangs scrapping

over scraps?

Shell SHOCK

Shell shocked Brandywine

Derelict houses left vacant

Shell SHOCK

Shell shocked Wilshire

War-zone front line

Shell SHOCK

Shell shocked Wilmington – you’re done

You’ve no comparison

Shooters and bombers just out for blood,

that’s all?

Shell SHOCK

Shell shocked Biloxi

Snakes fleeing the swamps

Shell SHOCK

Shell shocked Uptown

The levee is leaking

Shell SHOCK

Shell shocked San Antonio – you’re done

What’s the matter everyone?

Where is everything? Is it all

just gone?

                                       Complete Song

                             Music © The Goth & The Pixie

       Death On State Highway #2

The freshness has burnt from the dawn

So few have stayed, so many gone

I can hardly remember the dew

Tauranga’s just over that hill

And I think

that someday

I’ll get killed

Yes I will

On State Highway number two

It hurts where it didn’t hurt before

So much is less, so little’s more

The passing lane is just about through

I think I just need one more pill

And I think

that someday

I’ll get killed

Yes I will

On State Highway number two

The turns are too tight to build up pace

I’ve no chance in hell to win this race

Maramarua’s behind me now

But it’s too late to find her, anyhow

The gaps are all I have to show

So little learnt, so much to know

I lurch on blindly, without a clue

And still I feel like just a frill

And I think

that someday

I’ll get killed

Yes I will

On State Highway number two

https://gothandpixie.bandcamp.com/track/death-on-state-highway-number-two

Political Theory

                             A Political-Economy Ideology

The basic problem

of all human groupings,

from families and acquaintanceships and tribes

to workplaces, governments,

and cultural and global systems,

has always been the same,

probably since before humans

evolved into the species that we are.

It seems so pointless to me

when people point fingers

and denounce the Left Wing or the Right Wing

or religious fundamentalism or soulless secularism,

or coalition, two-party, or single-party governance,

or any other genus or species of ideology or system.

Russians used to joke that

although under capitalism man exploits man,

in the Soviet Union it was the other way around.

The problem, of course,

is and has always been bullies.

Aristocratic bullies and theocratic bullies.

Capitalist bullies and state-socialist bullies.

Bureaucratic bullies.

Bullies with weapons.

Bullies who enjoy humiliating others.

Sneering bullies; sniggering bullies.

Pompous, self-righteous bullies.

Patriarchal-misogynistic bullies.

Corporate bullies.

Local-government bullies.

Workplace bullies.

Cyberbullies.

Fucking, dick-headed bullies.

Forget the other shit.

Bullies are bullies and they rule the world.

                             Other People …

These people really do exist –

I met one of them once –

and they make a big public deal

a big public deal –

Writing letters to the editor every week,

hijacking meet-the-candidates get-togethers,

badgering councils,

issuing press releases –

and all because they have this obsession

and all because they have this obsession,

that consumes their lives

that consumes their lives,

about other people having sex

(I’ll just say that once)

sex of which they don’t approve

sex in brothels

sex with call-girls and gay escorts –

women – presumably solo mums and divorcées – and queers,

turning tricks in their houses!

with children maybe living next door!

Or maybe two doors down.

Or maybe they’re just having heaps of one-night stands –

In exchange for what?

who can tell?

but what the hell – what difference does that make?

We have to legislate against loneliness and greed

and hammered self-esteem!

We have to legislate against mutual exploitation!

We have to legislate against fucked-up people being willing saps and mugs!

We have to legislate against sadness!

That’s always worked, hasn’t it?

Don’t argue – God wouldn’t like it,

and they don’t like it, either,

those people – obsessed with other people’s sex lives.

Me, I’d rather not think about other people’s sex lives.

It’d just make me jealous.

      Chicken Little’s Prescience

I used to be active in the Green Party,

holding provincial party offices,

going to national party meetings,

helping to organise protests,

escorting visiting party leaders

and other visiting MPs,

convening policy proposal groups –

including initiating a policy proposal

that parliament passed into law,

naming, then editing

the party’s national members-only magazine,

and so on.

All I do now is vote,

and stuff letterboxes when asked,

and that’s just going through the motions.

I don’t really believe

that all this is going to matter;

what I do believe is that

the Bad Guys are going to continue to win

until everything’s gone.

I don’t believe

that writing this shit matters, either.

My audience is tiny

and my impact is miniscule.

I do it sometimes anyway, though,

but with ever-diminishing enthusiasm.

It’s just a way to pass the time

until I get to die.

Chicken Little was probably right, after all.

                Politicians & Morality

Ever notice

how ego and empathy

seem to be inversely proportional?

The more a person has of one

the less that person seems to have of the other,

and vice versa, eh?

Yeah, and it’s hard to be politically ambitious

without having a potent ego,

isn’t it?

                          Freedom and Fashion

Some time around the turn of the century,

when I was working around the edges of the university racket,

the new, young, opinionated grad-student partner

of a false friend of mine whose job was lecturer

responded to a joke of mine

about the black-out attire of the crowd at an All-Blacks test

looking like a convention of Iranian women

by denouncing the hijab and all Islamic cultures as oppressive,

denying women the freedom to choose what to wear.

The thought entered my mind of one of my daughters

telling me that on the previous mufti day at Girls’ High

all but a few of the 1,200 or so girls

had been wearing red, white, and blue Russell Athletic USA sweatshirts,

and recalling this to her I wondered aloud

which culture was more oppressively conformist.

She responded by getting more pissed off than she’d been before.

I wonder if she would now.

               International Diplomacy

I like the way they squirm, these diplomats –

American or Russian, it doesn’t matter which –

when they know that what they’re saying

is obviously bullshit

and in the defence of cruelty

and nationalised criminality.

They sometimes look as if

they’d much rather be conducting

a graduate seminar in international politics

or be working on a farm raising ducks,

but they know that if they didn’t lie

and disavow the basic principles of humanity

for their political masters,

someone else would be all too keen to take their places.

I like the way they squirm, these diplomats,

but often I really don’t.

         Leadership

A baby dies of the cold;

he doesn’t give a shit.

Refugees have nowhere to go;

he doesn’t give a shit.

He torments a young woman

until she snaps and sets up a public howl;

he doesn’t give a shit,

and thinks that those who do are inferior.

He gets caught out lying continuously;

he doesn’t give a shit.

Solid evidence of serious corruption

within his government

sticks its head up out of the muck;

he doesn’t give a shit.

All the evidence reveals

large numbers of hungry kids in New Zealand;

he shrugs it off as ‘one or two’ because

he doesn’t give a shit.

The changing climate

brings more destructive weather events;

he doesn’t give a shit.

He sells out his country

to his greedhead mates

for not-inconsiderable sums of dosh,

even though it means fucking it up

further on down the line;

he doesn’t give a shit.

He knows that history

is going to barf all over his name;

he doesn’t give a shit.

              Bullshit & Tear Gas, 12-2014

Unlike the United States, Haiti, Turkey, Egypt,

and other police states,

in New Zealand the state doesn’t supplement

the ample amounts of bullshit that it spreads

with shooting tear gas at its opposition.

Yet.

It doesn’t stint on the bullshit, though.

Make-Believe & Beyond

                            Signs

I knew the situation was hopeless

when the second thing she said to me

was, “What’s your sign?”

My sign.

Maybe she –

or one of her friends –

had stuck a ‘kick-me’ sign on my bum

when I wasn’t looking.

These things happen sometimes.

But maybe not.

Maybe I was supposed to have one of those

‘Hi! My Name Is’ signs stuck to my shirt pocket

with my name written on its blank space in marker,

but somehow nobody told me and I’m the odd one out.

Or maybe I wrote ‘Dick’ on it and stuck it to my flies.

But maybe not.

By the way, the sign I like the best,

in the abstract,

is ‘No U Turn’

a nice metaphor, eh?

but I don’t think that was what she meant, either.

I think she’s a birthday bigot,

and, like all bigotry,

I think that’s ugly, evil, and stupid.

Y’know, I bet she doesn’t care what I think, though.

She doesn’t have to.

All she has to do is know my sign.

She didn’t know it right then when she asked,

but no matter when my birthday is,

I’m just not her cup of tea.

Make my sign the one that says, “Exit.”

           Metaphysics

Sometimes it really pisses off

the child in me

that things that aren’t real

– magic, water sprites,

telepathy, matter transmitters,

and so forth – 

really aren’t,

but at least sometimes music

or psychoactive substances

or sleep

allow me to imagine

that they are.

        The Molecules

The molecules

inside my nervous system

dance,

and that dance is me

and what I have to contribute

to the universal soul.

In three weeks

all the molecules

in my nervous system

will be different ones,

the half-lives of molecules

being what they are,

but the dance

will be the same,

only incorporating three more weeks

of experiences.

      Sex and the Occult

I attended a séance once

when I was twenty years old,

having the day before

had sex with the young woman

who was acting the medium.

The séance, of course,

was a load of crap,

and I never had sex with her again.

A couple of years later

I had, for a few months,

the fortune to be the toy boy

of an ex-nun more than twice my age.

She paid some big-woo Hollywood astrologer

an obscene amount of money

to do my chart.

Its relation to reality

was on-target somewhat less often

than if its pronouncements,

which were mostly vague, anyway,

had been made completely at random.

        The Luck of the Draw

I can’t respect the intellect

of people who confidently assert

that there’s no such thing as luck,

luck being the unforeseen

random consequences

of billions and billions of causal factors

beyond anybody’s control.

Even attempts to control events,

being the cumulative

random consequences

of billions and billions of causal factors

beyond anybody’s control,

are really the result of luck as well.

The ludicrous fantasy

that things have been intended,

or were Meant To Be,

can be amusing at times,

but taken seriously is stupid and ugly –

something for stupid and ugly people.

       Sceptical Agnosticism & the Soul

I consider myself to be agnostic rather than atheist,

although the concept of the abrahamic god

is clearly ridiculous and pathetically childish,

in addition to being contradictory, anthropocentric,

contrary to empirical reality, and just plain ugly.

My problem with mainstream atheism

is its uncritical dismissal of the concept of the soul,

which seems to me to be an abandoning of scepticism.

Sure, it’s possible, even likely,

that when the circulatory system

stops feeding oxygen to the nervous system

that the energy in the nervous system

simply converts into potential energy

and loses all its data patterns.

It seems to me, however, that it’s also possible

that the nervous system’s patterned energy –

which could possibly exist as electromagnetic waves;

no one knows for certain –

could escape into the atmosphere, or even space,

retaining some of its data.

We don’t have the technology to test this hypothesis.

We can’t see television or wireless broadband

or other types of electronic waves

as they travel through the air

without the appropriate instruments, either,

and neuroscience technology is still in its infancy,

basically just tracking the flow of blood in the brain.

It seems like a maybe-maybe-not situation to me.

      Dream Magic

Air like dream magic

bloats the pale twilight

cool winds make people

think about gods.

I stay in my unit

where the air’s more consistent

and my loneliness seems

less acute but more hard.

You said that you’d see me

when I needed that and also

knew, as you did too,

that you were most unlikely

to return.

Despite the dream magic,

I know that the gods

are people’s creations,

like flower arrangements

and marzipan-frosted cakes,

but rarely so benign.

The night’s darkness softly closes

over the innocence of dusk,

caressing daylight’s hardness,

hiding banalities;

the raucousness from elsewhere

in the suburb and city

stirs up the spirits

in their godlike nastiness,

then subsides into the

air like dream magic.