%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

BUTCHERS CARVED IN STONE

What do horsemen have to offer
To times that can trample on their own?
Horsemen carved in stone
Can offer as much in human blood
As those who thundered through the mud,
Leaving us behind to survive and suffer.

What do butchers have to take
From times that sacrifice themselves?
The butcher only delves
Deep enough to rend the heart,
While we who practice the healing art
Of poetry must bludgeon it awake.

(repeat)


Words and Music by Galen Green c 1978


%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

THE DRUNK ON THE HIGH WIRE


My parents sold me to pay their taxes.
Now I teeter a hundred feet from my death,
On this narrow strand I call my home.
Yet it’s only my lack of nerve which waxes
This wire upon which I balance each breath.
Someday, I’ll fall like Saigon, like Rome,
Which is why my spinal cord never relaxes.

I’m the drunk you see on the high wire
With this balance beam which I use to fix
The planet beneath me. Full of rum
And steady as a hieroglyph,
I walk this length as a shrill wind picks
My flesh to shreds and leaves me numb.
Won’t you toss me up another fifth?

REFRAIN:
Above the crowd, I slide like a fox
Through a henhouse,
like a breeze through a tomb.
This high wire is the only path
I’ve known, since before I left the womb.
Deprived of safety net and bath,
As blind and confused as Oedipus Rex,
I inch my way from magic to math,
Trying not to look down at my doom,
As at my feet a downdraft sucks.

Sometimes I wonder how I’ve come
Into this hazard, by what hoax
Was I led into peril of life and tooth?
Below me I study your streets I’d roam,
If I could escape this distance which strokes me,
Numbs me like a fine vermouth.
Below, I can hear my destiny hum.


Words and music by Galen Green c 1986


&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

THE TOOLMAKER'S OTHER SON (circa 1955)

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%


THE DESPERATE HOURS


Dear friend, I think we’re prisoners with invisible stripes.
That’s how I’ll begin this song you’ve asked me to write.
We’re lost in this petrified forest of invisible hypes.
We wander through this dark passage all through the night.

I’d never ask you to thank your lucky stars
For bringing us together on this isle of fury.
The desperate hours flash by like subway cars.
I wonder where they’re headed in such a hurry.

Dear friend, I think we’re lost in this lonely place.
Would it do any good to knock on any door?
Should we paddle back up the river and try to retrace
The desperate hours that left us alone on this shore?

We’re two against a world of situations.
But the king of the underworld has an appetite
For the flesh of the men and women of all nations.
So the desperate hours they drive us through the night.

Dear friend, I think we’re angels with dirty faces.
The king of the underworld has us against the wall.
He’s a devil with women but lacks in the social graces.
So the harder he drives our hearts, the harder we fall.

We’re three on a match, smoking here in the midnight.
But this fire in the left hand of God is a holy terror.
It reminds us that we’re no angels dressed in white.
And so the desperate hours are going to haunt even our mirror.

Dear friend, I think we’re in a China clipper.
Dear friend, I think the winds a drift are out of control.
To sail across the Pacific, you must shed your lead slipper
And fly to your dark reckoning with both body and soul.

To have and have not a hand to put your hand in -
That’s the only question we follow into the big sleep.
Dear friend, these desperate hours are too deep to stand in.
But, dear friend, these desperate hours are all we keep.

Words and Music by Galen Green c 1978

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

Ecclesiastes 9:16 (KJV) Then said I, Wisdom is better than strength: nevertheless the poor man's wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard. -- Ecclesiastes 9:16(KJV)

%%%%%%%%%%%%%

AN MEI & GALEN, CONJURING

TOMORROW AND TOMORROW



Once I was caught in the mad flow.
My life was but a walking shadow
On its way to dusty death,
I dreamed of Lady Macbeth
In the dusty street of Colorado,
Where I dreamed of breathing her dying breath.

My heart was once full of worry,
So full of sound and fury,
Like a tale told by an idiot.
I was always stopping to pity it
Until I crossed the wide Missouri
And washed the pain from my pretty cut.

Chorus:
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
My life will be but a walking shadow
In the dusty streets of Colorado,
A tale told by an idiot,
Full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing
But arising in the spring
Signifying nothing
But arising in the spring
Signifying nothing;
But I don’t let it bring me sorrow.
No, I don’t let it bring me sorrow.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in its petty pace;
But I don’t let it bring me sorrow,
Not even when my fingers trace
The neighbor’s flowers I had to borrow
To fill my broken vase.

The streetlights of Colorado
Will light my way to dusty death.
My life is but a walking shadow
That fades a little with every breath;
But I’m not gonna let the mad flow
Drag me under like Lady Macbeth
Drag me under like Lady Macbeth.
(repeat chorus)

My life began in Missouri,
It’s a tale told by an idiot,
Full of sound and fury;
But now I’ve learned not to pity it
And now I’ve learned not to worry
About the salt that’s in my pretty cut.

I beg and steal and borrow
To keep away the sorrow
That creeps in its petty pace
Like the fractures in my broken vase
As tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Carries me away without a trace
Carries me away without a trace.
(repeat chorus)


Words and Music by Galen Green c 1978

AMERICAN SLAVES



Happiness hides beyond these gates --
Silver spoons and China plates.
But here we breed and slave and rot
And thank our oppressors for the little we’ve got.
Of those who dare to take a chance
By running away to wealth and romance
In far off parts of these United States,
A few of them make it; the rest do not.
The majority blind ourselves to our fates,
Play deaf, dumb and numb to what circumstance
Enslaves us to our pitiful plot.

We all are slaves to our family ties
And to whatever totems our parents baptize
Us to at birth. (This chain is mine!!!)
These are the slave shacks to which we resign
Our days with our cousins and uncles and aunts.
These are the factories that sprout up like plants,
Like tobacco, like cotton. None dares criticize
The poisons they make here and on which we shall dine.
Our sadistic oppressors we all idolize,
Because we need their bucks to finance
This earthly hell, this grim design.

These are our children and these are their fires
Which we sell for their heat to the sinister choirs
Of extinguishing gangster whose ways and means
Are more perverse than the kings and queens
Who once held their serfs in a feudal trance,
From Charlemagne onward — in England, in France,
In Russia, etc.-- while the clergy, with pliers,
Ripped out their genitals, backbones and spleens,-
Then played them like puppets from invisible wires.
These are our children. See them dance.
See them play out their pitiful scenes.

These are our hands. We sell them in pairs.
Hands that sweat while the bossperson swears
And threatens. Hands that would become wings.
Hands we fold in praise to kings
And shareholders whose childish extravagance
Feeds on our foolish intolerance
Toward new ideas which could banish our cares,
Hands we shackle with wedding rings,
Hands that get slapped if any dares
To point a finger at the arrogance
Of our proud oppressor, who mockingly sings.

We’re American slaves, ravaged and torn
From four hundred years of shucking corn
And parking cars. The needle glides
Toward the breaking point. The future rides
On our backs like Rajas on their elephants.
But this is of little relevance.
For it’s liberation and change we scorn.
Beyond these gates, happiness hides.
But don’t disturb our stupor to warn us
That we are but sleepwalkers, ghosts at a seance,
Oblivious to which way the avalanche slides.


Words and Music by Galen Green c 1989

AFTER-IMAGE



1.
This year’s been one in which I’ve thought of you and other friends, and wondered
How we do these passive panic dances, these old and new modes of alienation from
The light of who we are and...how we become the tree of our knowledge of what we
Want each other to see, when I think about you and you about me.

Watching a candle, I think again tonight of you and me and us and where we’d be,
If not for our brief sharing of those bright moments long ago on our way to these
True and separate moments here and now. I agree that sentimentality is hardly
Ever the right emotion. Yet, when I think of how we outgrew the past and each
Other, I close my eyes on the white after-image of memory, distant, tight.

2.
The clock on the wall tells me where to go, into the future in the only machine
I know. This jar of cider is all I have to show for the thousands of minutes I’ve
Dragged my fleshy freight from my mother’s feet where I used to play to my mother’s
Feet, which have followed me all the way to here and now. My breath just wants to
Say that it has enjoyed hosting my wonderful weight.

Watching this candle tonight, I cannot delay a moment longer in swallowing the bait
Of your face in my memory which from below consciousness swallows me. And here
I’ll stay from now until it all becomes too late to think anymore and it’s time to
Stop and grow into next year and tomorrow and time to wait and...time to sit and
Contemplate the gray.

3.
This year’s been one in which I’ve sat on the lawn and thought of you and other
Friends who’ve gone into the touchless past. Tonight, I yawn with joy and think
Of you...and prop my feet on an empty crate and rub my weary eyes and sip this
Jar of cider and the lies I tell myself as this once-bright candle dies.

The clock in my memory tells me not to treat these thoughts of you too rough,
Lest they rise and body forth into this air like the sweet reality of the you
I knew at the dawn of my days on earth: your shoulders, breasts and thighs
Composed by the gods of love, perfect, neat. This year’s been one in which I’ve
Played the pawn to the white queen of your memory, sketched on a sheet of blank
After-image, this empty street.


Words and Music by Galen Green c 1986

THE KID THAT WAS ME
(to the tune of “My Bonnie”)

1.
I think that I need some advice from
the little kid I used to be,
‘Cause adulthood has scrambled my vision
and makes me deny what I see.

REFRAIN:
Bring back...oh bring back...
Oh bring back the kid that was me...was me
Bring back...oh bring back...
Oh bring back the kid that was me.

2.
I need a good heart-to-heart talk with
that smart little kid that I was --
To remind me the emperor’s naked
and to show me the evil he does.
(...repeat refrain...).
3.
I need him (her) to yank back the curtain --
that smart little kid that was me--
To show me the wizard’s a humbug,
so that I can leave Oz and be free.
(...repeat refrain...)
4.
That little kid knew crap from Christmas
and called a spade a spade.
That smart little kid that I once was
looked the world in the eyes unafraid.
(...repeat refrain...)
5.
Oh bring back that kid for ten minutes,
and let these eyes see how it be.
Let me face this mad world through the eyes
of that uncensored kid that was me.
(...repeat refrain twice...)


Words by Galen Green c 1989