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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U04sl2XuH6Q4 May 2012 – 17 min – Uploaded by Moongoosetheband
MOONGOOSE & JEFF YOUNG – ‘DON’T PLAY! … La MongooseBand – Chimbo by JavibiGuitar302 views … |
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1) The mid watches of the night are the darkest hour
The metal of blood on the tongue and the wild wind mind
My pillow beats with the secret clocks of the heart
And the lullaby murmur of loss as the hours unwind
Where did you go and why are you not here?
Why can I hear your voice in the night machines?
My murmured name, your whisper in my ear
Your frightened face in the shade of broken dreams
I rise and walk to the river where we once played
The promenade still echoes with your bright song
A diamond kite and a thermos flask of lemonade
Are waiting in the past where we both belong
The sky is morning mouthed, it doesn’t rain it bleeds
The river is low and the oil refinery glows
Why do the ghosts of our loves deny our needs
Why aren’t they waiting where the River Mersey flows…
*
2) Printers ink on dad’s rough hands
He wanders through the warehouse
Pile after pile of comic books make a maze
He is amazed. 
A thousand, thousand Eagle’s – Dan Dare
And Digby on a mission to Mars,
My dad fingering the comics as if saying goodbye
Before they were set on fire.
And then, in the night the incinerator
Spitting flames and smuts of ash
As the comics perished in the fire
My dad’s sadness weighing down his shoulders
As he sat in the parlour telling us
He’d only managed to save one comic.
He had it in his hands – the first ever Eagle
With the spaceship Anastasia in the centrefold
We read it at supper time; I sat on dad’s knee
If a grown man could cry then he would cry at this
And somewhere on Mercury, Dan Dare
Was watching over us, watching us through the flames.
*
3) An Uncle with sawdust in his turn ups
Dancing to Glenn Miller 78’s on Boxing Day.
My mother was smoking a Woodbine
I’d never seen her smoke, it made her fade away.
‘Pennsylvania 65000!’ They all shouted
It was 1960 and we wished like mad for snow
A tin train set went round in circles
Its clockwork key spinning ‘til it died.
Norman blew cigar smoke into my toy car –
Donald Campbell’s Bluebird, blue as dad’s eyes
It was a roll back the carpets party
Feet tap tapping on linoleum, fat men jiving.
Where did it go that smoky day, 1960?
I can never get it back hard as I try
It was nothing special, just smoke and uncles
And my mum singing a sweet As Time Goes By
*
4) Bombsite demons are crawling through rubble
It’s the morning after bonfire night, smoke rises
I saw the devil collecting rocket shells and dead sparklers
He huddled in his overcoat, fire in his eyes
A boy had a saucepan full of baby mice
Pink, naked, writhing, helpless as they whirled
Around and around in the wall of death saucepan
As he hurled them into the burning void of the world
We picked them up – fat shrimpy corpses
And threw them into the embers of fading fires
The air thick with the stench of gunpowder and ashes
And the dirty, tarry stink of burning tyres
At school we swapped the casements of dead fireworks
In the playground sang the lyrics of the song
‘Light up the sky with Standard Fireworks…’
The pyromaniac joys of being young.
*
5) Sugar mixed with boiling water makes it stick to the skin
And burn and sting your flesh so much you scream
Night horses ride like wild fire through my bed at night
Burning horses, burning houses, burning dreams
Elsie Barmaid hovers at my bedroom window ledge
She’s draped in funeral rags, she calls men to her bed
I can hear her witchy finger tapping at the glass
Her laughter echo, echo, echoes through my head
I’m too young to know she’s fucking punters from the pub saloon
She has them down the alley for a quid
She sucks their living daylights out beneath the moon
Then tells the whisky priest the dirty stuff she did
I lie awake at night each night, I’m six years old
The chimney birds are trapped, dawn brings their death
And dad gives me dead sparrows that I gently hold
As if willing them the gift of one more breath
*
6) The gypsy fairground on the wasteland is a wonderland
The generator humming like heavens engine
You can almost hear the shimmering stars that light my dreams
Cat’s cradle constellations suspended over my ecstatic reveries
We cast magic spells in the drains and rain clogged gutters
Twisty fetishes made from lolly pop sticks and wire
I was scared of scarecrows, epileptics and lunatics
And the drunkards drunk on whisky and desire
The beauty, danger, wonder of this world where girls
Untouchable float through the night, perfumed and pale
I almost touched the skin of a yellow haired beauty
And I kissed the night cool air within her shadow
The man tied in chains by the landing stage
Sweats in his dirty vest, drips brown ale on his fat gut
He’s a Scouse Houdini, the smell of the devil about him
Oil and spit quiff and a fag in his yellow teeth
Old Man River leans and gobs into the Mersey mud
The river is black with oil and filth and shit
I am a child astronomer looking for shooting stars
In the dirt and myth of Liverpool’s mournful heaven
*
7) Kendo Nagasaki sits smoking on the wasteland
His mask is peeled back on his head like a balaclava
The ugliness of his wrestler’s body showing through his leotard
Sweat stained, too close to the Gods to sign my programme
I hallucinate a vision of shooting stars tonight
As dad and I are walking home with bags of chips
Nothing is said as usual; his blue ice eyes strike fear in me
A man never loved his son so much but he makes me shake
The vision of stars falls across the city, such beauty
It takes my winter breath away, I almost swoon
The terrible shadows of fear and confusion
As Gods carving knife cuts slices off the moon
*
8) How many deaths in the same iron bed can a mattress take?
Upstairs is stacked to the rafters with old peoples bones
The wardrobes and dressing tables are cluttered with dead fingers
Grandma’s hip and pelvis bones bundled in like cutlery
The dead’s bones are stored carelessly in the back bedrooms
Of derelict houses in Grey Rock Street
They make their presence known to frightened children
Percussing like piano keys in newspaper lined drawers.
*
9) Billy Fury’s brother was at the car auction
His platinum hair and golden skin shining in headlights
At home we put Billy on the record player,
I even said his real name – Ronald Wycherley – like a spell
And mum sang the words to Wondrous Place softly
‘I found a world full of charm
A magic place in my baby’s arms…’
And it was the most beautiful teatime in the world
At night beneath the blankets I listened
To the roar of the crowd at Goodison Park
Rolling over the rooftops like a cloud of men’s voices
Like weather and angels all mixed up in the night
*
10) On Goodison Road on match day the police horse falls
I can see the lather of its sweat and its fear filled eyes
The crowd move towards it as its legs give way
Grim fascination pulling them towards this animal’s death.
And then the dark blood pumps out of the horse’s mouth
Thick slicks of treacle blood gushing out of its guts
It takes the rider down with it; his uniform smeared with blood
Horses blood stinks. It stinks. It fucking stinks.
And then it thrashes itself into silence and stillness
And the lake of dark blood stains the cobble stones
A haemorrhaging horse watched by a five year old boy
Too stunned to cry, still clutching his rosette.
*
11) The Russian cosmonaut Pavel Popovich
Was orbiting Earth ‘To extend the domain
In which human reason reigns over the elements.’
Laika and Yuri Gagarin were in my scrapbook
And space hung over the streets of Liverpool
Like a glittering science fiction comic
The twinkling stars and planets dot dashing secret signals
And the Sea of Tranquillity beckoning me to heaven
*
12) It’s a heartbeat in the pillow kind of darkness
Where the daylight pours into the mouth of night
We are children, slipping into the under river
Looking for the engine room of starlight.
This is where the old men said the stars are made
Beneath the rolling tides of waters brown
This is where the constellations are lantern lit
Before they’re hung to illuminate the town
The Magic Furnace navvies hammer out the sparks
In the pandaemonium of fumes and fire
The old men drive in silence deep into the darkness
Their eyes alight with longing and desire
We are looking for the light ahead, we hold our breath
In case through river stone the waters seep
Grandfather’s hands point out the shadow shapes of death
And the ghosts of sailors wives who never sleep
This is the horror my grandfather filled our dreams with
Our seaside holidays were stained with fear
We’d dream the dreadful ocean rolling over us
As the dreaded long drive home was drawing near
Then again into the claustrophobic bible night
We’d sink beneath the river, hold our breath
My sister and I looking for the mouth of night
In the under river, star blind home of death.
13) The water up above our heads
Was full of dying eels and sunken boats,
And drowning men weighed down with rocks
In the pockets of their overcoats.
We closed our eyes and held our breath,
Our eyelids glimmered, fish flashed, bright,
A few minutes of nearly death
Beneath the river night.
A memory gloom of Billy Fury,
Marvel comics, measles and lost shoes.
The caravans of May, cold sea,
I Spy – mum in the front whispering clues…
Through darkness and through mystery,
The salt and blood of Old Man River’s veins.
The years are floating out to sea
The ultramarine remembering remains…
In imaginary submarines we sail
In secret through the closed eye seas.
The tunnel ever echoing
With forty years of fading memories.
*
14) Dad talked about when he was a boy during the war
The thrill of shrapnel gathering in the debris
Climbing through the skylight and lying flat on the rooftop
Watching the Luftwaffe bombing the Liverpool docks
After his accident I could hear his lungs inside him
Like broken machines winding down in the warehouse of his bones
I pressed my ear against his ribs and listened to him rattling
His skin was damp, oozing a hospital smell through his pores
A man’s blue eyes can begin to fade until they look like ice
His pupils were like smears of printing ink, smudged
Seeping into his retinas where he could still see himself
Falling in slow motion down a chimney shaft, death calling him home.
*
15) There’s a bowl of fruit on the table
Even when no one’s ill
A clock on the stairs full of insects
Out of nursery rhymes
The hole in the old man’s skull
Is as big as a ship ha’penny
I press my thumb into
Its warm hollow, feel his dreams
A blind man walking with his white stick
Folded in his pocket
Pouring boiling water
Into paving stone cracks
Out swarm armies of ants
A writhing snake of insects
Sidewinding across
The pavement to their death
*
16) So we sail in pedal boats over the murky water
Frith Beach 1965 and there are babies rocking in the depths
Anchored in tangles of fishing line and kite strings
I look into the gloomy deep and see small hands
A tin half full of water floating tilt on salt and scum
Is a scrap of doomed spaceship, a signal from heaven
That cosmonauts are in trouble beyond Andromeda
I scoop it up and look for messages inside in Russian scrawl
Intoxicated by great disasters beyond the distant stars
I gaze into blue space, lying on my back afloat and yearning
For something to remember for as long as I live
Unaware that this old tin can will be in my thoughts forever
*
17) The blind skeletons of burned houses, frail, falling
Mad vagrants poking sticks into braziers on the waste
Parlours where old ladies sat clicking their teeth and needles
Now heaven bound in the flames of this dead city
I walk through the ash pits of Everton and Anfield
The smell of ale, tobacco, peppermint from ghost factories
On the soot dark air where blind men’s sticks once tapped
And Guinness was mulled with pokers in hearth embers
Death is here, death and devils all around, eyeless and tormented
Stalking small kids in grey uniforms skiving off school
To run riot in the bombed out cavities of death terrace
Where catch a girl kiss a girl and skipping songs still ring
What happened to all the uncles and grandfathers who walked here?
Death came and got them one by one and made
Them into nothing, not even holiday snapshots, not even their voices
They are nothing, they are gone forever, everyone is gone.
*
18) The dog ate party balloons
And skated across the frozen boating lake
I dreamed of balloons bursting in his belly
And of drowning howls beneath row boating lovers
A man threw his overcoat onto the pavement
And trampled on the pigeons trapped beneath
Pigeon bellies popping beneath his boots
Spitting chewing gum and phlegm
In the cemetery we rolled down the hill
By the war memorial, gathering feathers
And oak leaves and placing them
In the hands of stone angels
I stuck my thumb into a hundred graves
And planted acorns in each one.
Out of the hearts of old ladies called Mabel and Ida
A forest of oak trees is still growing. Listen…
*
19) The dawn is phlegm and sulphur
The cutlery drawer of kitchen knives
In his head, blood stained
Stench of mildew, moth dust
Fate tapping at the window
Laughing at cheap opera
First thought, bad teeth, the usual
Catalogue unravelling through
His skull, metal, tannin, spittle
Hellhound Gospel on his pillow
Muttered prayer at daybreak
Let it be over.
*
20) Three women on the bus like screaming popes in curlers
Mutter myths of dogs and horses and lottery tickets lost
Their teeth are in the bellies of a swill of drunken sailors
Who they fucked half to death down an alley full of ghosts
Crow bag ladies claw their way to Co-Op queue fronts
Runts in shopping trolley’s lifting shoplifter shit
The soot black city is bending at the river
Like an old hag coughing her guts into the gutter
Blind man with electric blanket underneath his overcoat
Plugged into the cigarette lighter of his Vauxhall Victor
Rattling breath like a fucked convector heater
Going through the mill and the mangle like a strangled dog
Pulling worms from his pockets he throws them at his feet
And dances a lunatic ballet, leg bones stripped of meat
Home from the bingo his lover holds his heart
Tight, tight to what’s left of a life torn apart
And this is this city and these are the men and women
Who scramble their dreams in mangled folklore
Hewn from the cobble stones and dust of poverty
Eyeless and glad of it in the ruins of old gin palaces.
The furious inferno of this place, these lives, this Liverpool
Exorcism, frenzy, wild eyed hymns to a dead god
In cold winter daybreak we traipse through our hangovers
Watching the cracked hulks of oil tankers sink in the mud
*
21) Baptisms of fire have scalded their skin
The boys walk the streets; they’re too scared to sleep
Foghorns like ghost wolves calling to them
Invisible demons crawling from the deep
The boys bite their tongues with black gums
With dirty hands they rub their rheumy eyes
They cradle their wounds like babies
And walk like ghosts beneath the bloodshot skies
They pass the Hanging Man house
Too scared of suicide to linger
The dead man at the window
Drinking sour milk with his fingers
Don’t look in the window
Don’t put your foot in the door
Don’t mention the mess on the carpet
And don’t mention the war
Once they have passed the ruins
They utter the pagan curse
They think it keeps them safe and sound
From the widow in the hearse
*
22) In a shack out there by the landfill
Scavengers burn plastic off wire
The toxic PVC melts and floats
In the bin bag burning fire
The fridges door is swinging
Someone has been here
The grandma is too old and frail
To care about her fear
She takes her hands to pieces
Makes a book mark of her bones
Inside the family bible
Then she fills her mouth with stones
The ghost of her dead lover
Watches as she sinks beneath
The cold bath tub of water
And submits to tears of grief
*
23) We pull potatoes out of the earth and eat
The scarecrows dance across the muddy waste
The lunatics approach in search of meat
They’ve smelled the smell and now they want the taste
The mental hospital is dark as night
A Ghormenghast we glimpse through woven hands
Our hearts embrace the dying of the light
We dance across these wild, demented lands
Our ancestors are rising from the mud
We howl like dogs, our suppers have gone cold
We have the wolverine within our ritual blood
We are so young and yet we are so old
The cobwebbed kingdom of the aerodrome
Is crumbling beneath our naked feet
We swear we’ll live like this and not go home
We pull potatoes from the earth and eat.
*
24) Bodies are found after tip offs here
The hinterland where people bury porn
Landfill, power stations, pylons, canals
Old warehouses and bonfires of truck tyres
And this is where the brothers wait
Biding their time, terrified of their own flesh
Beneath their tattered Oxfam suits
Their bodies torment them, their ingredients
These half men are made of dog meat
And nail clippings, offal thieved from abattoirs
The fallen hair of the demented
Death dust from sheltered accommodation
We are five year old carpetbaggers
Carving up pieces of the full moon
And dragging it to the scrapyard
Smoking Woodbines and pulling our own teeth
Igniting dragonflies with burning corn
Our mouths full of flying saucers and cough mixture
We shelter in the shadows of dark Arkham
In shoplifter overcoats and urchin shoes
And when we meet the Golem Brothers
They are rocking in their chairs
They sing like mad Appalachians
Cobwebbed mouths uttering curses
The night horses ride across the rooftops
Their houses are on fire
And blind with cataracts and grief
The old men sing of their desire
And these men are the Golem
We get the Golem we deserve
In brown paper packages tied up with string
Beat hearts of pigs welded to limbs of dolls
*
25) Their teeth are ground with glass, the lullabies are broken
The mouths that sing the nursery rhyme are tainted with neat gin
A dark forest encroaches and the tangle trees are choking
The primroses of innocence with wild weeds of sin
Oh the devil came at bedtime and he tucked me in a quilt
And he bundled up my childhood in a cat filled sack
In the night canal the drowning kittens scratch at my skin
And the Golem Brothers watch as the world turns black…
*
26) In his attic bed my granddad transforms
Into the city that he loved so much
His wrinkled skin blisters and ruptures
Strange houses, high rises, office blocks burst
Through his pores, crippling him with pain
A dual carriage way ripples down his spine
And he is screaming, City that I grew up in,
City where I played as a child; It rips him to pieces
And the wires inside him tug at a heart turning
To concrete. He spasms, pulling rubble from his sockets,
And throws it to the ground with electrocuted fingers
He is bursting through the rooftop, he is Liverpool’s death.
*
27) The death-bird in his open mouth
Rattling in the cage of his bones
I press my ear to his mouths cave
And hear the birds of hell in his throat
The craw craw craw of death
His fingers locked inside my hand
We make a pagan prayer of skin on skin
His knuckles are a string of beads
A rosary to bind myself to him
The craw craw craw of death
As if his final words were nailed
Into the blood and blister of his tongue
I pray for his last breath each night
I pray to fucking God that we were young
*
28) Salt clogging up his skin, the river in
The whites of his eyes, dirt foamed, haunted
Marauding into the harbour crannies
The maze of shipping containers, blind labyrinth
The wild bliss of holy martyrdom and madness
Bewilderment at the terrible loss of things forgotten
Scratching at his nitty hair as if to claw a memory
Out of the dark recesses of bitter dreams
He hallucinates a vision of ruby whores
And drunk Jesus staggering down the dock road
When the moon is nailed to midnight
Spitting whisky, spitting regrets, spitting nostalgia
And for what? What did he do with the years
What did he do with the pissed away chances
And why is the gutter so familiar, so much
A part of the badly lit blind alley of memory
Fuck the lot of them, no wait, remember now
The child he was is looking at him, staring
Out of the acid glare of a headlight, smiling
Give it a stab, a last one, a fist of it. Please…
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