1. |
The Hour Glass
04:13
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Time is the movie in which we play minor roles
Time ticks and time tricks us with the illusion of eternity
Time waits like a wolf at the door
Time flows from us like water, blows through us like a breeze
Time takes a silhouette and puts it in your mind
Time takes a sweet regret
and leaves it somewhere you can’t find
Time never sleeps, but always dreams
Time is a lifelong joke with a killer punchline
Have you got enough time?
Time ticks another tock
And makes a new tomorrow
Til the clock slips another cog
And the time you’re on is borrowed
Time takes the witnesses who shared your story
Time is now
We ride it out of the past and into the future
Time grinds diamonds into sand
and that sand fills another hour glass
Time is a roulette wheel on which we bet until we’re broke.
Have you got enough time?
Time ticks another tock
And makes a new tomorrow
Til the clock slips another cog
And the time you’re on is borrowed
Time drips another drop
The seconds seem to linger
As the sand from the hour glass
Is running through your fingers
Time is neither linear nor real
Time is the God without whom nothing exists
Time is what everything takes
But in the end, time takes everything
Time turns new with second hand
Time despises the constant grovelling of clocks
Time ticks another tock
And makes a new tomorrow
Till the clock slips another cog
And the time you’re on is borrowed
Time drips another drop.
The seconds seem to linger
As the sand from the hour glass
Is running through your fingers
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2. |
Another Shoreline
04:03
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Now the shoreline lies before us
As our ship's bow ploughs into port
To a new land where new life
Fills the bewildered milling quayside
Where staring strangers are gathered there to greet us
A new dawn, another shoreline
A new dawn, another shoreline
A new dawn, another shoreline
A new dawn, another shoreline
Fate saved our souls as we braved
Roaring gales and sea-monsters' jaws
Which all strove to swallow us whole
But now lie lost in our wake
Across the aching ocean acres guilty of taking us
Kidnapped, press-ganged, forever from our homes
A new dawn, another shoreline
A new dawn, another shoreline
A new dawn, another shoreline
A new dawn, another shoreline
And so her shoreline hauls us all in
Like some fresh catch of netted fish
And we will soon forget our former homes, lost histories
Stolen loves and lives
But we will build ourselves a better time
Beneath this discovered canopy of alien stars
And anchor ourselves firmly in this new found land
A new dawn, another shoreline
A new dawn, another shoreline
A new dawn, another shoreline
A new dawn, another shoreline
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3. |
Time Tripper
03:56
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We'll begin
Well beyond the late-Victorian imaginings of H.G. Wells
Come with me
Pressing forward half-a-century plus
We're in the 1950s
Gone from England to America
We're with the CIA
Conducting covert mind control experiments
Here's where we first feel ourselves
Slightly slipping on time's tenuous banana skin
And we see objects instantly shift locations
An inkling you'd have missed if you'd blinked
Lose ten more years
Somewhere in the 1960s
We'll almost touch time-travel again
Oh so nearly peeling ourselves away from the now
Almost actually letting go
To tumble into the future-past
On a whole host of hallucinogens
Peyote, LSD, magic mushrooms and more
Oh, but then we lost it
Lost the plot
Simply got swallowed
Stole ourselves a century of shallow selfishness
We'll jump that hurdle too
And here we are
At the true start of our journey
We're on a warming planet
Where nothing that's nailed here will survive
This will be our most ambitious leap
One millennium forward
So that we can survive
And life goes on
Wish us luck
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4. |
Threads
03:19
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New day
You wake
Earthquaked
Body bound in bedsheets
Head held entirely trapped
Under its debris of collapsing dreams
Straightened out, you hit the streets
Thickly tangled trails of traffic track and trace
The entire tapestries of countless lives
This close-packed global mesh seethes, ceaselessly
Deep in the dense, dark, undead earth beneath
Packed trains shuttle down tunnels
Gas and water pump through pipelines
Cables carry currents
Overhead, planes pace planetary pathways
And, threading through the brains of the living
Billions of thoughts per second commute
Stretched between uncounted catacombs of rooms
Taut wires team with voices and images
As does the entire ether via higher satellites
Yet, see you
Woven well within your secrecy of walls and windows
Believing yourself mercifully deaf
To the sin of such a cacophonous din
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5. |
Dead Lines
02:35
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It's September in New York City
Days shorten and their balmy evenings
Populate piano-bars with jaded journalists
Wordsmiths of world-weary wisdom
Authors of an uncertain age
Who're handsomely paid to pit their pithy wits
By penning pieces impaling the mood of the moment
Zooming in on the zeitgeist
The barmen are there to pour them all one more,
One more and one more for the road
But theirs is never a novel
Only an endless stream of counted column inches
Which map the monthlies, weeklies and dailies
Of this city's magazine-stands
It's the late 1940s
What drives their writing is a blend of alcohol and chain-smoking
With a war just won
Their thoughts tumble as freely as autumn's falling leaves
And cynicism rules
Dorothy Parker, Lillian Helman, Martha Gellhorn, Hedda Hopper
Walter Lippmann, H.L Mencken, Louella Parsons, Dorothy Thompson, Walter Winchell
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6. |
Just For A Moment
02:07
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Just for a moment
I thought I saw you
Just for a moment
I thought heard your voice
I remembered all the times that you were there
That summer
That day
That year
But you were never in this room
You were never in this house
In this street
But, just for a moment
I thought you were still alive
I thought you were still alive
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7. |
Moonwatchers
03:46
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I was there
Was there when this moon secured control of tides and seas
Then demanded bats and owls and more night beasts like these
I was there
Witnessed when she climbed the sky and fell back down again
Watched the way, while she was full, torn minds would turn insane
Embrace the darkness
Welcome the night
Drink my health with absinthe in the moonlight
I was there
As a child, watching moonbeams dance on slumber's cover
Saw her dreamy light unite loner with a lover
I was there
When my moon and midnight met and celebrated mass
Knew her hue of deepest blue could never come to pass
Embrace the darkness
Welcome the night
Drink my health with absinthe in the moonlight
And I am here
Man in moon
See him shine
Feel him stretch my face and spine
Man in me made lupine
Grey fur coats this form of mine
Embrace the darkness
Welcome the night
Toast your soul with absinthe in the moonlight
Where spectral moonlight conjures its ghosts and ghouls
And vampire gangs craving blood comb city streets
Embrace the darkness
Welcome the night
Drink my health with absinthe in the moonlight
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8. |
Four And A Half
03:48
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A bare room in the bus depot and I sit on a bench
Standing in front of me is a bored teenager
No more than seventeen
He wears a military uniform
He's playing a game with no words
Listening carefully to music on his iPod
He casually waves a loaded rifle round the room
Pointing it first at a wall
Then straight into my face
Then out of the window
Targeting a succession of passers by
When I was his age and drunk on holiday in Italy
Me and some local lads got into an argument with the police
It grew heated
One of the lads hit a young cop
We all ran away, laughing
Suddenly
Bullets from an automatic began thudding into the wall above our heads
I dived through a doorway
A whole family, sitting around their dinner table, mid meal
Glanced up to see me, a mad Englishman
Sauntering drunkenly past them through their kitchen and away
Years later, touring America with a couple of punk bands
A cop stopped us after midnight on a beach somewhere in Los Angeles
He told us to take our hands out of our pockets
When I didn't, he pulled out a gun and stuck it against my head
I got angry, or is arrogant a better word?
Anyway, I refused, saying
I'm English and I'm not used to cops with guns
Ask me nicely
Take your f###ing hands out of your f###ing pockets now!
He said
Motionless, I stared back at him
Just do it, Nick
Said my friends
So I shrugged and held up my hands
Turning to the others, the cop told them
I didn't know if he had a gun
I wasn't gonna wait and see
Then, addressing me, he added
You're lucky
I was counting to five before pulling the trigger
I'd got to four and a half
I'd got to four and a half
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9. |
The Columbus Memoirs
07:23
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Yesterday
I came across America
While clearing out the cupboard in the back room
Picked it up
Opened it at New York
Streets that hadn't been dusted in years
Took out a skyscraper and lit it
Towering inferno that tasted fine
Decided to write the book
It was late spring
That morning I went to the garden and dug up the biplane
Wings that glinted in the sun
It flew better than ever before
And I determined, there and then
To take up that option on the necessary airspace
To mount a voyage of discovery
So we systematically killed off their buffalo herds
Nowadays we'd destroy their factories
Same difference
Came in low over Manhattan
Monday: built The White House
Tuesday: erected The Statue of Liberty
Refuelling in a small town in the West of Ireland
"America?" repeated the man
As he passed me the last of the cans of gasoline
Sunday: played baseball and built a church
Custer's death on the evening news
Arrival is immunisation, immigration, passport control
And The Committee of Unamerican Activities
Departure was: cancel milk and papers
Leave front-door key with the neighbour
Switch off gas and electricity
Reports high cloud and clear weather ahead
Little sign of air turbulence
The wings glinted
Three week supply of food and drink
Landed in New Hampshire
Climbed down from the cockpit
A small step for man but
Designed a flag
Built a cabin
Learned my zip code number off by heart
Watched our civil war from the roof of The Empire State Building
Got home in time to catch the Late Late Show
Or else, I rang some friends
Party, my place
And we talked things over
Decided to call them 'dollars'
Later, we go out, buy hamburgers
The guy, he likes our money, we like his burgers
At the drive-in movie
She suggested 'colour' could be changed to 'color' without a 'u'
On the way home, I said, "and 'thru' instead of 'through', OK?"
She said it sounded fine to her
So we got married
Had two kids
And decided to head west in search of gold and a new life
Thirteen stars, that was obvious, but how many stripes?
Later, we added more stars and bought Alaska, wholesale
Put an ad in The New York Times
It read
Wanted, covered wagon, two horses
Will exchange for biplane
Good flyer, only one previous owner
A hundred miles out we join up with a wagon train
It features John Wayne, RIP
And we each get twelve dollars a day as extras
Union rates in those days
And the kids died
One of fever before we'd reached the Midwest
The other in Korea
Some work in Hollywood before the depression
Made some dealing in slavery
Lost it all in a poker game
Marriage annulled
Hoboed, swept bars, bummed cigarettes and stole
Got drunk more times than I could count
Threw crates of tea into the harbour
Those were the days
I could dance as well as Fred Astaire in my youth
Do you remember Sly & the Family Stone at Woodstock?
Far out!
Do you remember the Alamo?
Too much!
Do you remember who cut down the cherry tree and never told a lie?
Groovy, baby!
Watergate, and the ways the wings glinted in the sun
Do you remember all of that?
I won a Purple Heart in Vietnam
Killed children and mainlined
Swore allegiance and swore, and still hate Puerto Ricans
Ecology, cosmology
Walt Whitman's white beard, and the collective guilt
I was with Lincoln when he okayed the dropping of the H Bomb on Cuba
We drove out the British
Imported apples and horses and god
Marketed tobacco and coffee and black musicians
I rode pillion with Pancho Villa on a Harley Davidson 74
Paid for by the CIA
By day, we dealt in drugs and guns
By night, bugged and burgled by Presidents
We slept beneath the Star Wars
Dreaming of our Nazi past
To wake up one day beside James Dean
Were with him still when he died of AIDS
And we were waiting on the quayside
Whenever they shipped in the zipped-up
Handsome, homecoming hero stiffs
Were cheering when they lowered the last of the batch
Into oceans of empty rhetoric
We buried Buddy Holly in a jukebox
My motto was: 'the only good Injun's a dead one'
We used to sing all the time
Penny whistle, a banjo, a guitar, a drum
Proud songs that made tall men
I remember it all as if it were yesterday
"Yes," I said to him, "America!"
And climbed up into the cockpit
The wings just glinted
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10. |
Dignity
04:48
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Dignity
For those on the run
From the prison, the gun
For those who escape
After torture and rape
For those who are homeless and hopeless and stateless
For those grown so thin, they could almost be weightless
For those left too weak
Or too frightened to speak
Like the poor kid who hid
But who saw what they did
For those who've not eaten
The pursued and the beaten
Who fled when the harvest had failed
Who came home to loved ones impaled
For those who've walked and walked and walked from far away to here
For the traveller who doesn't need a bloody souvenir
For those who wake up from their dreams
Shaken by shadows and screams
For those who were lucky to lose just a limb
For those from the boat who were able to swim
Yes, dignity
If you please
Dignity
Dignity
For those not given the chance to choose
Who carry the little they've got left to lose
For those who've been moved on so often before
That they don't even care where they are anymore
For those for whom water is worth more than gold
For those who've held children whose bodies turned cold
For those who now know that they'll never return
For those who've watched all that life meant to them burn
Just give me some dignity
Just give me some dignity
Just give me some dignity
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Nick Toczek & Signia Alpha Bradford, UK
Poet Nick Toczek began collaborating with Matt Webster in 2019.
They released Shooting the Messenger in 2020. A mix of
indie, jazz and funk grooves with Toczek’s surreal poems and stories.
Walking the Tightrope followed in 2021 & included a guest appearance by The Damned’s Paul Gray.
A third album in 2022. Webster plays many of the instruments with contributions from guests, including Paul Gray,
... more
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