JOHN GREAVES
Songs

BAD ALCHEMY
Words by Peter Blegvad, Music by John Greaves

I dream Hermaphrodite and I sit up all night
Our eyes on the horizon of a wobbling bowl
Heads in hands we ponder dregs the bowl contains
A liquid's left putrescence after being drained

What we feel we have to solve
Is why the dregs have not dissolved

When I wake I wonder what it means
Am I bad alchemy? It seems
I image self unmixed, a risk,
In a dish for drinking
Fluid with a strongly stinking sediment
Is that what it meant?

I dream Hermaphrodite and I sit up all night
Our eyes on the horizon of a wobbling bowl
Am I hermaphrodite?
Neither one nor quite the other?

What we feel we have to solve
Is why the dregs have not dissolved

GEGENSTAND
Words by Peter Blegvad, Music by John Greaves

It but incurs
A lustre in a flood
After many not dislodged

And at each subsidence
Half arises
Half holds to cloudy water
Nature of its anchor kept occult

We keep a current
Flowing from a sluice
Cloud it with corrsives
Hoping to appropriate
What holds its own so well
What tips an ever wider wake

KEW.RHONE.
Words by Peter Blegvad, Music by John Greaves

(Who?)
We who knew no woe
We who were her hero
(When?)
When we were on her knee
When we knew her
When were were one
(Where?)
Kew.Rhône.
We won renown
(How?)
We were her worker
We won honor enow
When we knew her
When we were one
Where?
Kew.Rhône.

Not a set animal
Not a set animal, laminates
Laminates a tone of
A set animal
Animal, laminates
A set animal
Animal, laminates
Laminates a tone of sleep
A tone of sleep

Peel's foe
Not a set animal
Laminates a tone of sleep

MOSTLY TWINS AND TRIOS
Words by Peter Blegvad, Music by John Greaves

This is due to be
just a memory residue (repeated)

Envy, green as ivy, lubricates an axel
to the point of frenzy

Yes, a bucket as it emplies
has significance inside a space like this one

Much of the space is peopled by mostly twins and trios
freed of anything like frenzy

The implements which killed them,
once excited to a frenzy, mostly twins and trios

SAD EMISSION
Words by Peter Blegvad, Music by John Greaves

Testing 1-2-3... Do you read me?
Do you receive me? Am I coming through?

I'm the signal on your radio
But I'm getting weaker
so turn up your speaker
for a minute or two

It's true that other radios than yours receive me
But this emission's specially for you

If I could I'd give you all my money
So you could hear my signals in stereo

But to make it easy in the meantime
Move a little nearer, so you can hear what I sing

And I sing of this signal on your radio
And with your permission
I send this emission
directly to you

ACTUAL FRENZY
Words by Peter Blegvad, Music by John Greaves

First that a wheel like a mill-wheel turns between two trees.
Then that the trees store a substance in their foliage which they broadcast in installments to the wheel.
Then that this substance nourishes and lubricates the wheel and makes it turn.
Then that two men are walking inside the wheel.
First that their walking turns it. Then that its turning forces them to be always walking.
Then that the foliage blows green.
Then that the nourishment broadcast is envy, that if the wheel had what it wanted it wouldn't turn and the men would not be walking.
Then that even turning slowly, wheel is emblem of a kind of frenzy.
Then that a space extends to either side of trees and wheel and recedes to a horizon behind them.
Then that much of this space is peopled.
Then that the space advances to constitute a foreground and that this foreground encompasses a pit.
Then that certain people in the space are holding objects.
Then that in a space like this one an object is the attribute of whoever bears it, much as saints in icons bear as attributes the implements which killed them.
Then that in a space like this one even a wheel like a mill-wheel has its attribute: the continuous chain of buckets which it drives.
Then that when the wheel turns, buckets rise from the pit full of rocks and mud, empty themselves down a chute at the top of the cahin, and return down the other side, bottoms up, for more.
Then that a bucket descending empty is emblem of *residual* frenzy.
Then that a bucket coming up full is emblem of *potential* frenzy.
Then that a bucket as it empties is emblem of *actual* frenzy.

SOLITARY
Words by Peter Blegvad, Music by John Greaves

The human ass comes under fire
Asses resemble closely other asses
In curves & masses
Firing the same at the right time
Best if one is like oneself, solitary
Best when men mix to be the one unmixed,
neat, undiluted, solitary

What gladness to flee the world
Into a new world made largely with the intellect
Amid the ravishing lucidity there,
things that can be & cannot be
get well churned together
There big & little must be the same
in that the difference doesn't make any
"Little" is transformed,
from being small "a paltry thing
becomes the janitor of the wide world"

Like you
Is this "you" not yourself?
Not you? Why not? Not long enough?
You & your long enough
Who do you think I am?
I am you
Yes, you - that whole great
majestically startling
mentally epic burning
model of heaven

FOR BEARINGS
Words by Peter Blegvad, Music by John Greaves

He sets nothing by a star
Course least of all and great store
By a flurry more of wings than weather
The influence he's under
Which is, it happens, hers

MILK
Words by Peter Blegvad, Music by John Greaves

In the dark
From crude compoundings
Comes a white pus
Phosphorescent from all its encounters with darkness

And out of darkness it will appear
Gushing from the ground
From the nipples
Diverse parts of the breast
Even from the armpits

It is white in all cases
Drink and seed in one

The piece of liquid referred to as 'this' in :
"nourishing, soothing, still warm,
ah, surely it befits us to drink this..."
to mutter with closed lips
with closed lips
to suck in

IRMA
Words by Peter Blegvad, Music by John Greaves

It is night
Irma's lying next to me
It is dark
I hear sounds disturbing me
Several people are entering the room
I can't move
I can't reach my weapon
The people (all men) climb the stairs
From basement up to bedroom
They're talking to me
But the words are muffled
Absolutely unintelligible
I try to curse at them
Ask them what they're doing
When they're disturbing me
But I'm unable to speak to them
And they pay no attention to me
They disrobe
Attack Irma sexually
I'm unable to see her face
Or their faces

SILENCE
Words by Peter Blegvad, Music by John Greaves

"The rest is silence"
With this her letters all begin
She remembers numbers
The message that his code was in
She re-numbers members
To look like parts of other men
In its humid hollow
His tongue will find its roots again

"The rest is silence"
Towards it every number tends
As it tends to matter
The matter in a manner ends

'Neath a tree with leaves as big as she
Breaking his code, she broke his code

HOW BEAUTIFUL YOU ARE
Words by Peter Blegvad, Music by John Greaves

From the window of our honeymoon,
the night looks a mite bizarre
They're burning us in effigy
and smoke's blotting out the stars
They're torturing our servants
by the light of an armoured car
Please don't ask if it's the end of the line -
you know I never could see that far
Tonight I'd rather look at you,
How beautiful you are

If they ask you "what are lovers?",
tell them "lovers are"
Set against the order,
we live outside the law
I'm no hero under torture,
I'll tell them all I heard and all I saw
I saw everything in you, my love,
it seems it's all I ever saw...
Tonight I see it all anew,
How beautiful you are

Pass me the binoculars -
no, no, leave them where they are
Don't want my vision magnified,
I don't need to see that far
From the window of our honeymoon,
draw the curtains cross the bars
Let's spare ourselves that spectacle,
the problem's theirs not ours
Tonight I'd rather look at you,
How beautiful you are

THE BEE DREAM
Words by Peter Blegvad, Music by John Greaves

Each of us has in our soul
A portion of eagle, a portion of mole
One soars in the sunlight
One soars in a hole
The mountain which looks like a prop
Is black at the bottom and white at the top
Soldiers surround it with twine
I have to cut through it to claim what is mine
Its summit is marked by a tree
My double in uniform challenges me
He says "is this tree mine?"
I say "tap it and see"
He drives in a platinum spout
Turns the tap on, all this jelly comes out
Royal Jelly I stored in this tree
In an earlier lifetime, when I was a bee
Yeah, I'm a King Bee, though my wings be furled
And my kingdom is not of this world

SWELLING VALLEY
Words by Peter Blegvad, Music by John Greaves

Every valley swells up and turns
Black with desire
To be the last frontier
Desire is

Abalone and Silver Bow
Cowboy towns
Swell like bell-metal
For the sheer hell of it

This is not all pleasure
Either:
Make my crooked straight
My rough places plain

No frontier
No matter how rough
Includes itself as data

Which brings us to the desert
We swelter in
No plain was ever rougher
Nothing plainer

ALWAYS BE NEW TO ME
Words by Peter Blegvad, Music by John Greaves

We are what we pretend to be
"More true than real", if you follow me
It all happens so suddenly
"More true than real", if you follow me

"That which is firm doth flit and fly away,
that which is fleeting doth abide and stay"

At least that's what the poets say
It all happens in a single day
The girl I love put her lips against my ear
and whisper:
"We are the only people here,
do what you want to do to me,
but...
Always be new to me
Always be new to me"

We bud, we blossom and we blast
It goes by so fast
I hope I'm buried when I'm dead
My head resting by her head
on a single pillow in a double bed
Never to be bothered
"Always be new to me
Always be new to me"

From any B to any A
From apple through to zebra say
We always take the quickest way
And arrive before we started
Always be new to me
Always be new to me

THE PRICE WE PAY
Words & Music
by John Greaves

If I live too long
I will sing too many songs
If I die today
You will love me anyway

I could be brave, suddenly
Coming of age, suddenly
There are some words better said
silently

Wake into sleep, suddenly
Shallow to deep, suddenly
You may love me
We will die anywayw

THE SONG
Words by Peter Blegvad, Music by John Greaves

Town in the shadow of a mountain
Crown of the mountain came avalanching down
All summer long
We are stalking what
We came to call the Song

The Song was a kind of eruption
Mover of mountains, avalanche of crowns
When we were young
We sought the laws
We thought would cause the Song

Life is a dream
We are phantoms
Man is the union
Of divinity and dust

All summer long
When we were young
Before we'd sung the Song

No mere machine made of music
Of words and music as other songs are
This was the Song
A recipe, a remedy, a cure

The Song would be sung on the border
Sung by us standing, straddling the line
Between two worlds
Unified only by the Song

BACK WHERE WE BEGAN
Words by John Greaves, Music by Sophia Domancich

Lie there love and fear not while love is here
Whisper in my soul "what was part is whole"
Sense cannot admit absence, nothingness

Say this breath goes now
We know not why nor how
It mets and makes no sound
Turns the air to ground

Though I say what I should not
Let you hear
Evidently, there is no season
Mortality, if there's a reason
We know not what it is

In worlds enough and time
This sadness is no crime
Bend to what is near
Safe from harm and fear
Oh this is a lucky day, anyway

We take our parting of
Sublunary love
Two souls which are one
Parted for too long

Love is born anew in me, in you and me
We come to the end and start all over
The A and the Z of one another
Back where we began

THE ONLY SONG
Words by Peter Blegvad, Music by John Greaves

Imagine a world where this was the only song
& against your will
You had to sit & listen to it all day long
until it made you ill
Until it made you ill

Imagine a world where this was the only song
& against your will
You had to sit & listen to it all day long
until it made you ill
Until it made you ill

Imagine a world where this was the only song
& against your will
You had to sit & listen to it all day long
until it made you ill
Until it made you ill

Imagine a world where this was the only song
& against your will
You had to sit & listen to it all day long
until it made you ill
Until it made you ill

Imagine a world where this was the only song
& against your will
You had to sit & listen to it all day long
until it made you ill
Until it made you ill

etc.