From my poetry blog.
Low River Listless and limp; unmoving bowers, no rain to wash her barren banks or call to arms redundant birds, incumbent on unforgiving scree. A hiker slides an angled drop, picks a route along the exposed spine, leaves behind dislodged stones. ©AndrewJamesMurray
North and South Korea getting together for coffee and now Abba bringing out new material. I think I’ve slipped into a parallel world. Probably some time during the school holidays.
I’ve been having one of those nights.
I love Buckley, his voice; his playing.
And it’s all such a damn waste isn’t it? Such a tragic, pointless death that could have been easily avoided.
He left us without reaching anything like his potential, but that is just my own selfish lament.
After that acclaimed debut album, Grace, he was finally ready to record the follow up. He sent cassette demo recordings of the new songs he’d been working on to his band so they could familiarise themselves with them on their way over.
While his friends were in the air Jeff was already drowning in the Wolf River. Following his father Tim Buckley into an early grave.
Those songs, destined for an album named My Sweetheart The Drunk were eventually released posthumously on Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk.
Further hints of what could have been.
This is one of those songs, one I’ve been playing over tonight. Beautiful, and poignant with the opening lines
Time takes care of the wound
So I can believe
You had so much to give
You thought I couldn’t see
R.I.P Jeff. Keep singing.
From my poetry blog.
To the rear of the house, through the wild and wintry blades, setting the nerves on edge: the small talk of trees.
Taken in the early 1880’s, this is one of the earliest images of the East End of London.
I love the way the children appear insubstantial and ghost-like, which in effect they are. Lingering echoes of lives long lost, wandering along now vanished streets.
. . . my children in our local shopping centre. Take it away, kids!
Whose side do you think the crowd was on?
From my Poetry blog.
When In Rome I was talking to a Swiss girl, she told of a former classmate who plucked out all of her eyelashes, inflicting a vulnerability on her soul. I bartered with the tale of a girl who shaved off all of her eyebrows. I’d received the news when drinking beer by the Colosseum, that place where gladiators had impaled by trident and sword point. She had scalped herself with a Bic. (She met me at the airport, masked by a silk bandanna. I knew what she concealed. She knew that I knew.) Sometimes she would descend the stairs wrapped in a yellow sari dress: “Look at me, I’m a Punjabi girl!” Dancing around the room like some insubstantial sylph ©AndrewJamesMurray
City Jackdaw 