Come on Everybody

by Adrian Mitchell

  They adjusted his face so it faced the face of the moon

  And they told him: ‘There is your one true melon,

  Your forever melon, your melon of melons.’

  Now, fully grateful, he watches the melon rise,

  The setting of the melon, the new melon and the full melon,

  With a smile like a slice of melon in the green-and-yellow melon-light.

  To My Friends, on My Fiftieth Birthday

  My darlings, my friends, makers of all kinds, what can I say to them?

  Go on with your labours of love, for you build Jerusalem.

  My friends, my darlings, what can I say about you?

  I will love you forever, I would have died without you.

  How to Be Extremely Saintly, Rarefied and Moonly

  (for Becky, who, when I spoke about resisting my urge to lie around watching videos all day told me: ‘Let your temptation never fail you.’)

  Let your coconut be your guide

  Let the sun stew in its own juice

  Let your coat and rent your hat

  And let your temptation never fail you

  Let the good times roller-skate

  Let me inside-out please, I forgot my keys

  Let the flim-flam floogie with the floy-floy rock ’n’ roll

  But let your temptation never fail you

  Let the lecturer be harangued by the blackboard

  Let your letters stamp their footling feet to better letter music

  Let us play soccer together with a bonny lettuce

  And in the Beantime –

  Let your temptation, Becky, never fail you.

  Loony Prunes

  (an apology poem for my daughter)

  We played the savage ludo which is known as Coppit,

  Chatted, drank wine, ate lamb, played Beatle tunes

  And then we started it, found we couldn’t stop it –

  A contest to eat maximum loony prunes.

  They weren’t just the ordinary, wrinkled, black,

  Laxative fruit imported from – who knows?

  But, floating in a stinging pool of Armagnac,

  They were sozzled Français lunatic pruneaux.

  Then, indoor fireworks, and the sharp flashes

  Of three-second sparklers, dull horse-races,

  A wonderful serpent, a frilly fern of ashes –

  While the loony prune-juice flushed our faces.

  As I was trying to put the fireworks out

  We started arguing like sun and moon.

  I grabbed you as the whole world seemed to shout.

  You ran upstairs. I’m sorry. I’m a loony prune.

  To Michael Bell

  (my teacher at Greenways School whose motto was:

  ‘A Green Thought in a Green Shade’)

  In the second year of the Slaughter

  I attended a school in Hell

  Feeling like King Lear’s fourth daughter

  Strapped down in a torture cell

  Then my blue and white mother appeared to me

  And she saw I was all afraid

  So I was transported mysteriously

  To a green school in a green shade

  And there I met a great mechanic

  And he mended my twisted wings

  And he gentled away my panic

  And he showed me how a vision sings

  And I thank Michael Bell most lovingly

  For the mountains and lakes he made

  And the way he shone the light of peace on me

  Like a green thought in a green shade

  Beattie Is Three

  At the top of the stairs

  I ask for her hand. O.K.

  She gives it to me.

  How her fist fits my palm,

  A bunch of consolation.

  We take our time

  Down the steep carpetway

  As I wish silently

  That the stairs were endless.

  SONGS FROM SOME OF THE SHOWS

  Gardening

  (FROM The Free Mud Fair at Totnes)

  EVE: At the heart of the Garden of Eden

  Lay a pool of golden mud

  I was the pool

  And my name was Eve

  One day I stood up like a fountain

  And began to mould my body

  Till it felt right and good

  Then I made Adam out of the same golden mud

  I made him different for fun

  ADAM: Thank you for creating me

  EVE: Shall we make more people out of mud?

  ADAM: Yes

  You make some like me

  I’ll make some like you

  EVE: Let’s make them all different

  ADAM: Why make them different?

  EVE: For fun for fun

  For fun for fun

  ADAM: No…No…

  Two kinds is enough

  Two kinds is plenty

  EVE (to audience):

  My secret name is Peace

  (to ADAM)

  All right, Adam

  EVE & ADAM:

  So we made children out of the mud

  Thousands of children out of the mud

  Two kinds of children

  Only two kinds

  All of them totally different

  The Violent God

  (FROM Move Over, Jehovah)

  Barbed wire all around the Garden of Eden

  Adam was conscripted for the First World War

  And it’s still going on, and it’s still going strong –

  Hail to the violent god.

  The old survivor said: I was in Belsen,

  I’m grateful to god because he got me out of Belsen,

  When I die please bury me in Belsen –

  Hail to the violent god.

  The god of hunger eats the people of India

  The god of law and order spends most of his time

  Smiling at the back of torture rooms –

  Hail to the violent god.

  Children were smitten with parents.

  The black man was smitten with the white man.

  The white man was smitten with the motor car –

  Hail to the violent god.

  Spastics teach us how to have pity

  Leukaemia teaches us the dangers of anarchy

  Schizophrenia teaches us sanity –

  Hail to the violent god.

  Calypso’s Song to Ulysses

  (FROM Lash Me to the Mast!)

  My hands are tender feathers,

  They can teach your body to soar.

  My feet are two comedians

  With jokes your flesh has never heard before.

  So try to read the meaning

  Of the blue veins under my skin

  And feel my breasts like gentle wheels

  Revolving from your thighs to your chin.

  And listen to the rhythm

  Of my heartbeat marking the pace

  And see the visions sail across

  The easy-riding waters of my face.

  What is sweeter than the human body?

  Two human bodies as they rise and fall.

  What is sweeter than two loving bodies?

  There is nothing sweeter at all.

  Lose yourself, find yourself,

  Lose yourself again

  On the island of Calypso.

  The Children of Blake

  (FROM Tyger)

  The children of Blake dance in their thousands

  Over nursery meadows and through the sinister forests,

  Beyond the spikes of cities, over the breasts of mountains,

  The children of Blake dance in their thousands.

  They dance beyond logic, they dance beyond science,

  They are dancers, they are only dancers,

  And every atom of their minds and their hearts and their deep skins

  And every atom of their bowels and genitals and imaginations

  Dances to the music of William Blake.

  Happy
Birthday William Blake

  (FROM Tyger)

  When he was alive everybody used to put him down.

  Now they’re writing volumes and they say they’re sad he’s not around.

  But they wouldn’t know Blake if they saw him

  And heard him

  And shook him by the hand.

  They wouldn’t know Blake if they took him

  And tried him

  And shot him from the witness stand.

  For Blake was a man like any other man

  But he trained his hands to see

  And he trained his tongue to pop out of his ears

  And he cried with his toenails

  And the hairs in his nostrils

  Danced to the music of the oxygen.

  And they took a thousand million bricks

  And they laid down Blake like a foundation stone

  And they built a city-prison on his chest

  But nothing could hold him down.

  For he took a draught of explosive air

  And he shook off London like a crust.

  And he sang as he stood on the edge of the world

  And he worked as he stood as he sang

  And he built Jerusalem

  He built Jerusalem

  With his soft hard

  Hard soft hands.

  So it’s happy birthday William Blake

  What you’ve done can never be undone.

  Happy birthday William Blake

  Tyger of Jerusalem and Lamb of London.

  Happy birthday happy birthday

  Happy birthday William Blake.

  Poetry

  (FROM Tyger)

  Poetry glues your soul together

  Poetry wears dynamite shoes

  Poetry is the spittle on the mirror

  Poetry wears nothing but the blues

  It’s the gumboil gargoyle that falls off the cathedral

  To land on the crown of the Queen.

  Grab it while you can, it’s the magical needle.

  It’s bitter sixteen and its flesh is bright green

  Poetry glues your soul together

  Poetry wears dynamite shoes

  Poetry is the spittle on the mirror

  Poetry wears nothing but the blues

  Poetry’s a lion on the stage of the opera house

  Doin’ a little jammin’ with his brothers and sisters

  Hits you, slits you, almost never fits you,

  you and your lover get covered in blisters.

  Poetry glues your soul together

  Poetry wears dynamite shoes

  Poetry is the spittle on the mirror

  Poetry wears nothing but the blues

  Poetry’s the moon’s own bottle of gin.

  It’s the purple ghost of Duke Ellington’s band.

  It’s a bucket with a hole for collecting truth in

  And the legless beggar army of Disneyland

  Clinton hasn’t got it, but there’s plenty in Fidel.

  Slap your sherry trifle on my sewing machine.

  Bend it into bowlines but you’ll never break it

  The only way to make it is the way you make it

  Only thing that matters is the way you shake it

  Poetry glues your soul together

  Poetry wears dynamite shoes

  Poetry is the spittle on the mirror

  Poetry wears nothing but the blues

  The Tribe

  (from Man Friday)

  The tribe changes

  As a tree changes.

  When the storm throws its weight against a tree

  The tree bends away.

  When the storm falls asleep upon the tree

  The tree stands up again.

  The tribe changes

  As a tree changes.

  The children are the blossoms of the tree,

  They laugh along its branches.

  The old are the fruit of the tree,

  They fall when they are ready to fall.

  The tribe changes

  As a tree changes.

  Nobody tells the tree how it should grow.

  Nobody knows what shape it will assume.

  The tree decides the angle of its branches.

  The tree decides when it is ready to die.

  Medical

  (from A Seventh Man)

  The fit are being sorted out from the unfit.

  One in five will fail.

  Those who pass will enter a new life.

  One in five will fail.

  Ride the Nightmare

  (FROM The Hot Pot Saga)

  I was zooming round the Universe feeling like Desperate Dan

  I was bombing them at random looking for Charlie Chan

  I looked and saw a continent without a single man

  Which they told me was Asia but it looked more like Aberfan *

  So ride the nightmare

  Jump upon its hairy back

  Ride the nightmare

  Ride until your mind goes black

  It’s the 21st century werewolf

  21st century werewolf

  21st century werewolf and it’s coming this way

  Well the charity lady wiped the diamonds from her eyes and said

  ‘I’ve been saving all my money but the African dead stay dead

  I’m sending them elastoplast and dunlopillo bread –

  But they wrote me a letter saying: Send us guns instead’

  So ride the nightmare

  Jump upon its hairy back

  Ride the nightmare

  Ride until your mind goes black

  It’s the 21st century werewolf

  21st century werewolf

  21st century werewolf and it’s coming this way

  Well the rich white Englishman can easily ignore the rest

  For the poor are just a bore and who can use the starving and oppressed?

  They’re burning while you tell yourself there’s nothing you can do

  When your turn comes they’ll do just the same for you

  So ride the nightmare

  Jump upon its hairy back

  Ride the nightmare

  Ride until your mind goes black

  It’s the 21st century werewolf

  21st century werewolf

  21st century werewolf and it’s coming this way…

  * This first verse was rewritten around 1986 and it now goes:

  I was zooming round the universe feeling like Sylvester Stallone

  I was bombing them at random looking for Gadaffi’s home

  I saw a Royal baby in a cradle of silver lace

  And I saw another baby with flies feeding out of his face…

  A Song of Liberation

  (FROM Houdini)

  Padlocked in a barrel full of beer

  And almost dying from the fumes –

  He did not despair.

  Lashed to the waterwheel

  Tied to the sail of a windmill –

  His skill did not desert him.

  Chained to the pillar of a prison cell

  Riveted inside a metal boiler

  Stuffed into the top of a roll-top desk

  Sewn inside a giant sausage-skin –

  He out-imagined every challenger.

  Plunged into rivers, handcuffed and chained

  Strapped to a crazy crib by mental nurses,

  Tied to a cannon with a time fuse,

  Hung upside down in the water torture cell,

  In a Government mail pouch,

  Even in the grave,

  Even in the grave when he let himself be buried alive –

  Even in the grave

  His brain and body worked so perfectly

  That he broke free from the grave.

  And when the body of a man

  Has been buried in the earth

  And that body reaches up to the surface

  That body reaches up towards the light,

  Towards whatever shines –

  Joy fills the
people, magical joy.

  Joy at the magic of his liberation,

  Magic that touches the surface of your skin

  With a magical shiver.

  What is magic then?

  What is magic? What is magic?

  Beauty that takes you by surprise.

  The Widow’s Song

  (FROM Mowgli’s Jungle)

  My husband was strong

  My husband was warm

  His loving was

  A thunderstorm

  But a fever came

  And took him by the hand

  Now he is dancing,

  Dancing, dancing

  With the ghosts in Ghostland

  My baby could stand

  My baby could dance

  His hands and legs

  Like little plants

  But a tiger came

  And took him by the hand

  Now he is dancing,

  Dancing, dancing

  With the ghosts in Ghostland

  And now I am poor

  As poor as a stone

  All day and night

  Alone alone

  Let dreams tonight

  Take me by the hand

  And I’ll go dancing,

  Dancing, dancing

  With the ghosts

  With my lovely ghosts

  With my lovely ghosts in Ghostland

  The Truth

  (FROM Love Songs of World War Three)

  The truth is the truth

  Is a strange kind of animal

  The truth is the truth

  Only comes out when people sleep

  So I stay awake listening for the truth