SALTY BLUES

Deep, south, way by the American Orleans live many.

Penny Lanes, pumping like arteries of warm blood;

The blues of life that rise in flood.

An Indian dharma immigrant, Raj, whisky-swigger, comes to cut his lock of hair

In the sweltering monsoon of the afternoon.

Orleans folk, like Red, ooze those twelve-bars:

Octaves in this slow parade: filtering through majestic oaks in sunny church-yards on Sunday.

Exploited people, for all those wrongs that Red cries, the good Red sings.

Children fish and build rafts, and run in the woods.

Gigantic freight trains rumble and whistle to lone train posts.

 

The free ladies, Nancy, sample all that melting pots bring;

Musing by the town hall in her Rastafarian hat and slender sarong, where mysterious strangers drone.

Shed smile that smile, which knows why scarecrows, dont scare the eagles.

All in a Western humdrum hanging on for dear life:

Clutching fistfuls of dollars, under the baking blue Orleans skies,

Tasting dangerous life, with tongues out.

The Pacific breeze would blow in the evening to the land.

Vast pockets of life would smoulder together at bars

And the mysterious strangers share raw scar tissue.

 

Once, old Raj pulled his .32 trigger.

Old Raj lost his halo.

Old Raj was imprisoned.

And Red and Nancy

They would visit him sometimes

And listen to his maggot stories in a shithole prison.

Raj hangs on to escape he misses his visions those long visions

Where he wants more than anything, anything at all, to escape

Far away, to the crystal chandeliers of Pacific Waves.

 

Well now, Nancy, she works being a beef factory inspector:

She converts Red to the real ideals of Buddha.

Red does things, and sees Bhodidharma atop shagpiles of lifes grind.

Raj lives his, back at the shithole: surrounded by epidemics of voice disease.

Automobiles become common in the vibrant ages of civilisation,

Everybody drives into their heavens, they become common.

 

The waves of the underworld blow their breezes this way, across their ashes.

The ashes, sit, under the stars, on a risen island, the deep sea

Ubiquitously they will never be blown away.

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them. Disagree with them. Glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Think Different, Apple.

I hope for these people, they always

Bask on their odourless permanent islets.

Lazily, our deep eyes

Sing salty blues.

 

 

 

, January 2002