i've only just found 'end of days' on youtube - i guess i didn't sign up or something for notifications, somewhere, wherever....
it's now on play-10-or-so, louder each time, and on a loop...
i've never been able to articulate - to anyone, ever, anywhere, even my closest - how much NMA means to me, and always-has, and
always-have, and always-will.
nobody gets it, and never has, that i've ever met. if i coulda figured how to get to NOATV i'd have been there, for the simple love of it all, breath, and voice, and salt. closed eyes, head back, face into the wind.
but, well.
i don't know if this is the best way - copy and paste - to share this, but, well, here it is. face into the wind.
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this long, long road, looking back and miles yet to go... through the confusion of years, consolation's cold wind and a hand at my shoulder; contentment, and fear, and abandon; and the baying dogs always at my back, regret across these miles...the black tide and the lullaby of hope...
so, the hard words of it all...
this quiet, terrible song. born in the australian heat, fulham street, a short ways out west. at 6, mother, father, boy, north to distant, salt cold. i grew, there, one score and 4, in a granite city's cold and, later, with in a castle's long shadow a mile away. south and east on blind winds, battered into a new mind and a new world and then, seven more down, south again, laneways merged with the notion of family. two more cities on the road, two more mountains climbed, two more skins shed.
so many places, so many people - friends, loves, hopes, joys, abandons - and not knowing anything else, what to do but run? too many times to know what i had...
maybe we're all the same in that: a price, in everything.
twelve, thirteen, in the village library. a new card for borrowing vinyl and cassettes and books, worlds every one new. only - maybe - a hundred and fifty, two hundred, in our little place: yes, and jethro, purple, and rainbow and what. i take them all, two a week, learning, finding, feeling my way into something that i later, much later, come to understand will underwrite and overlay every part of me.
love, and humanity, and hope, and courage-in-the-face-of. i take each home, and i sit, and i listen - i hear, and i learn the words, the hymns and the howls and the prayers, and i read the sleeves, and i learn the names, and the language, the peoples - and, sometimes, i tape them, when i feel the heart's beat: sony c-90s, dixons 60 minutes, all those beloved ferrous oxides, rails of sound unknowingly tracking into my later worlds. memories of things, today, and now, and of times far gone.
record-and-play, and radio one's top 40, sitting there, two hours, poised. and in amongst all that wonder, grandmother's footsteps, on the front step of my life. the front step of all of my life.
and red and black and glaring eyes, swathes of fire on 12 inches of vinyl, plastic-bound, still and even-now in a box, and, next to it, now, most all i've ever found: the maps of my heart, made real in the quiet moments in this life's song. i open that box, sometimes, and i find indira's net - all of me, looking back, at all of me.
college and a paint-hard rucksack; get me out in my first rented room; space, out of nowhere; army jacket and fringed leather; oddbins and andy and tapes to trade; the dream of eleven sweet years, a dream held fast, even now, even now in the dark...
and years pass, and things do what things do. i walked, and i travelled, and i worked, and i thought i was figuring it all out. young, then, and still and forever in the mind's moment, still figuring it out, still chasing the comet's tail, still never quite... and each year, now, older, i look and i think '...wait! what that meant was...' these words, beautiful, painful, never spoken.
my strange brotherhood, never met, never spoken, and not understanding the gatefold cost 'til it's too late; a lullaby to my mother near the end, and to another still unknown; the big blue, and island-abandon beaches; and prayer flags in the sunset; and friends loved, and friends thrown away, and windows on foolishness; and revelry, and abandon; and recovery.
and sun, through it all, sun, and the dawn, and the approach of autumn. and winter, bright, and brief, and maybe always the dream, the white light. And always the lovesong.
but always that fear. the headlights on my tail, and dead eyes, watching.
never a howl in my ears; 'i was never scared', and all those other lies. teeth biting at your heels, and always that fear, and always the road, and all of it beautiful, and all of it, always, dying.
and, sometimes, there's so much love you don't know what to do with it...
and you get older.
and another country, and another, the long road never fully walked, still crossing the water. the wide open becomes a fear of all else, and hobbled by the knowing. one more step, and one more. and the legs now don't know anything else. and the heart beats the same, big, and rich, and red, and no greater love, but afraid of that beat, always somehow afraid.
i think maybe i've been afraid, seems like my whole life. i faced it down, but what you never hear is that it doesn't leave, it doesn't go. the bully doesn't reveal a coward. you beat him, he gets back up, just dirtied. and all you have, at the heart, is to face it; head up, heart strong, even if you're weak with the price, the every-day-of-it toll.
stronger? more able. brave? hold to that, if the word works.
facing into the wind, to begin the day even with salt words and understanding; machetes and AKs for all the rage that still blunders through hateful guts; down on that leeds road, 3am and weeping for the hopeless black, all those things beyond control, beyond sense; the ocean, always-and-always rising, the dark tide, the crash that my black heart quietly wants; and the north st, shining, for all the friends lost, the moments, and chances, and loves, dragged into this gale.
and for that one great, and true, love, gone.
and the tears come, for all of these broken-hearted days, and all the places that i've been. filled with wonder, and the way that she used to smile, and my empty hands.
somehow, from out of this no man's land, the slow years have brought a strange, deepening warmth for the beauty of this glorious, faltering, false life: the sacred breath and the white light of it; the sunlight, always the sunlight, glinting.
in the particular, careful land of this heart, good enough can never, now, be good enough. the heart may be a thing red, and rich, and filled with beauty's quiet hope, but it beats, and beats, and no man's chambers can contain that rhythm, no wooden words, no shrug can contain its wild tides.
all that rich, and red, and ragged love came quiet, eddied where it should have been the wildest wave, always and within and something outward. no sky in her eyes, no eleven-and-all-the-gods-more sweet years. and now..? ahead, and beyond.
and back to the long, long road.
the things that i was sure of, i found deep in the frozen ground. the river that runs through everything, nearly gone. slow motion, unfolding.
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the months, now, so far away, and returned to the sun setting on all we three family thought we had, goodbyes seen through moving panes of glass. the lullaby is mine now, this long goodbye to the woman who made me, shaped me, and the ghost of a father who i now see was never true.
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the hole in the deepest parts, and the soft voice that speaks from it, quietly, quietly.
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these are the waves that crashed down, the waves that have borne me upwards, through the wildernesses of plenty, and of thunder, and of consolation. maybe i was just born feral, unable to wear the day's clothing.
the storm roars, and the anchor holds, but to what, and how, i don't truly know. and the tides, and how they draw? the horizon glitters, but with promise or blades or teeth i can't tell. stormclouds, maybe, or mountains in the light at the day's end.
and now, with so little left to release, words are thrown windward, salt-bound and swept into silence.
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each of these days, these minutes of a life, alone, and knowing. two miles of black below, and the small lights are moments swimming in the consuming dark. and the why of it? because this poor, blind heart tells me good enough can never be good enough. the hubris of rage, and the skeleton trees.
the dark deep to my left, and the long road ahead. and the weight of mountains in the distance. and in my sunset fury, you gods, of fate or whatever, i face into your cold wind, and keep to the hunt, in these, the years of consequences and in the quiet thunders of consolation.
and yes, sometimes, i wish that it was over.
so a salute, then, to courage; to all the dread red earth walked; to all the times i spoke and you weren't there; to the big blue, and all beyond, in this cold wind off the southern sea; to the ocean, rising, in my poor, slow, and blackening heart, 'mid all this anger, stronger than all my stupid fears; to all my smoke-borne prayers sent flying; and, in all of this end, to the castle, burning.
and, maybe, sometimes, in all this love, in this howling, wondering space between breath and rage and fear...
...a glimpse of horn, and of spear.
o you gods...
bring me the snowfall.
bring me the cold wind.
bring me the winter.
take me to the source of the river.
take me to the fire.
and to the end of days, unfolding.
i love you all.
