I´ve aften been speart fit´s aneath ma kilt
I´m seldom believed fan the answer is tailt
I dinna tell lees or let fantasy ride
It´s only a cloot fit covers ma pride

Spear aboot Nessie or huggis or drink
They´re phantoms o romance, nae fit ye think
Jist walk on the lochsides, the bens and the glens
Efter yer dein there come spear me again

Fit dis a Scotsman keep under his kilt?
His pride and his loss and his love and his guilt
A dirk in his sock, in his sporran a flask
An a hanfae o wode te mak a new mask

At´s a the wrang questions bit it´s someway te start
Ye maybe should spear fit he huds in his heart
Well, maybe ye shouldnae unless ye hae time
Te listen te stories o national crimes

Aboot Charlie and Wallace and bloody King James
Aboot a o wer bairns fit died in their names
Vikings and Romans eince raked ower these lands
They died by their thousands at my ancestors hands

There’s glorious stories o war and defeat
O loss and injustice fit wid gar ye a greit
So watch fit ye spear fan the fusky is near
For the rant and the rave is oors tae the grave

The empire we built is under oor kilts…
And that is fit made Scotland the brave

Life is a bit shorter
With each dying day
Like an old song by Simon
we’re slip-sliding away

The poet’s words are often true
Like a song sung just for you
Loving you, my child, my friend
Is like a song that never ends

This symphony has kept us right
My darling daughters, my guiding light
Each smile and laugh, and every word
Compose a song just we have heard

It’s painful for a weekend dad
Alone all week and often sad
Some tunes need those minor chords
Sometimes sadness writes the words

When Friday comes to ease the pain
My chorus girls warm up again
My orchestra begins to play
And angels sing on Saturday

I found something true in the book ‘Peter Pan’
“You can’t catch me and make me a man”
Deep in my chest, my heart’s running wild
Scorned and denied since I was a child

Like Peter and Wendy, be happy or fall
Dance with the devil that lives in us all

Captain Hook and Peter Pan
Feral child and frightened man

We dance the fight both young and old
It’s thoughts of flight that make us fall
Finding our Darlings have grown up and flown
Adds frost to the chill that we feel in our bones

Their story the same;
The Hook and the Pan
From devilish child
To beast of a man

Did Barrie sit back, his stories all told?
Was the mote in his eye fire of youth growing cold?

The lost boys, once happy
Abandoned the Pan
Imagine the sorrows that haunted the man

Magic and kisses and fairies and love
Belong to the children who fly high above

Monsters and pirates and clocks in the night
Belong to the adults who are certain they’re right

The story needs both – a battle to win
Respect for our children is where we begin

The sky and the mountains were boiling some clouds
Two drunken Brochers were talking too loud
The charis, Manali, the Old Monk and the grass
There a jewel in my life I never could let pass

It was forty degrees on the day we came down
Out of the mountains into Pokhara town
The hemp in the hedgerow was at least ten feet tall
Seemed like heaven and earth weren’t that distant at all

So we tore through the dope and we necked all the food
Even two red eyed Brochers could see that this was good
The beasties we killed! but that was the plan
To leave lots of bodies in the wake of the white man

There was Dirty Harry and his chum in a cafe selling rum
He offered me some dope I mind – some Temple Ball, a special kind
Well, in a puff of smoke I left with Dirty Harry in his vest
I still recall his flip-flop dance, his three piece suit and yellow pants

Those Nepal nights were glory days and even through a red-eye haze
My mind slips back and forth through time across better days I know are mine
But never yet and ever still will dreary days with beauty fill
For one great moment in Nepal, I lost myself and found it all

Here and now are poles apart and in-between is where we start
Things we surely start to find can slowly start to change our minds
But travel down these roads we must on the paths of fear and trust
For one brief moment in Nepal, I found myself and lost it all

If you look into my eyes and see a hint of last goodbyes
Then take some time and take my hand
I’ll guide you through the things I’ve planned
Be careful of the empty spaces
They’re deep and dark and leave no traces
Beyond them, further round the bend
We’ll climb my hill of broken friends
That hill is big, the going’s tough
So watch your step, the ground gets rough
We’ll climb atop and share a joint
So when we’re stoned, you’ll see the point
The sprawling landscape all around
Is built of all the things I’ve found
There are places here, such awesome sights
Made of days and sleepless nights
Do not be scared of what you see
It isn’t good nor bad – it’s me
Now raise your eyes and spread your wings
We’ll soar above the way of things
But fly beneath the clouds of doubt

Or else we’ll never work it out
The details that define the light
Are black as Hell and cold as night
Take a look and try to see
Abandon is what sets us free
This island made of special places
Amidst this sea of nameless faces
An island where there are no lies
or tears of hate or anguished cries
The natives here are glad you came
and everybody knows your name
In every smiling face you’ll see
Reflected love that came from me
And every time you smile or laugh
You’ll open up another path

So take a walk and find a place where I can tell you face to face
What happened when you took my hand and left for Skye to see the bands
We made a place inside our minds – a garden you and I can find
In this garden grows a tree which bears a fruit called ‘memories’
In space and time and tears and rage our moments turn to nameless age

So if we part or journey on
From time to time, just drift along
The sea of faces in your mind
Climb the hill, just look – you’ll find
A garden.
Hidden, growing wild.
It’s been there since you were a child
Take a seat under the tree
Take some time, remember me
Our time here will decay with age
So plant a seed inside this page
And life is short
And all things pass
Some friends go, some friendships last
Although these days must surely fade
We can’t deny the smiles we made

The Devil, The Ishwar, Jehovah and Sol
Are busy upstairs dividing the souls
The dude taking tallies and counting the cost
Cries on the Ledger for the numbers they lost

To heaven and hell, the pathways are clear
Just follow the call of your laughter or fear
But one slip is slaughter
In this veil of tiers

If Edward the child met Edward the man, he’d say
“Look at you now. What of our plan?”
I could offer no answer
I would just turn and go
To abandon that child is to lay yourself low

With truth in the balance and justice gone blind
Forever is the child that plays in your mind
A soul that can’t growThe spirit can’t bind
The hope is in children – In love left behind

Time trickles on and the planets all spin
You flail through the darkness that comes from within
Somewhere behind you, a child softly cries
Somewhere before you, a lonely man dies

The burdens are ours, the choices we made
We walked in the sun and we crept in the shade
Each failure, a debt that we owe to the child
Honour your children and watch how they shine

Salvation – a drug that eases the pain
Redemption – a chance to do it again
Damnation – the wool that covers your eyes
Hell is the failure of all that you tried

Are angels the people you meet on the path?
And demons the chances you often let pass?
If GOD & The DEVIL are playing a game
The roads to their kingdoms begin in their names

From infants to adults, together we race
If ever you fall, or if you lose pace
Forever alone in the night dark and cold
Torment for love as your body grows old

Slip on the madness
All is made clear
I can see Heaven
And Hades from here

Not all changes are obvious. Some things mould and shape our lives over such a long time that we forget or deny the idealist child and lawless youth who built their castles in the sky, deep behind the horizons we dipped our gaze from so many years ago.

Mostly, you find yourself being leaned on from so many directions that a purpose, a step, even a stolen glance become mere distant and futile gestures which mockingly scamper behind your eyes; a constant reminder of every wrong decision and social disgrace which has blackened the mortar of your life since you were sentient enough to realise you were being judged.

Fear brings terror and eventually, frozen, silent rictus. Horror and love become pale and faded tomes on a dark and dusty shelf crammed with emotions and experience ranging from the subtle to the extreme, mundane to bizarre – all of which once held you awestruck.

Little by little, these hunted experiences have drained the colour and taste from your reality – causing your days to be grey and your nights eternally cold and lonely.

So like a predator, you pace the length of the shelf with a hunger that would only be sated with anything you have not got and nothing you have. You hope and pray that you have missed something, that there is a release from this coil but ultimately, you don’t even know it’s name or nature. Somewhere along this path, you shamed yourself, you judged yourself to be less and you condemned yourself to seventy years of social inadequacy without parole. Misfit.

Time now to worry about your children and stress yourself into another breakdown because all the filth and flippancy that you so warmly accepted into your own life have become a threat to your children’s retreating innocence – perhaps the only truly beautiful thing that ever graced your days being swept away from you by the currents of time toward a land of vice and opportunity of which you hoped they would never hear.

You may realise that you are not a deviant or a pervert or social leper but a member of a generation that has united itself in it’s non-conformity – products of fashion and MTV and Budweiser – a battery hen with a designer badge. You will carry the burdens to the end because that is what you have always done, a weight of complexities placed firmly on the shoulders of the same joint-rolling, Levis-buying fool that left school confident in the knowledge that he was ready to change the world and that the world had indeed, been waiting for him to put things right.

In my mirror dwells a fiend
He’s shattered every dream I’ve dreamed
His eyes are red and darkest blue
Damn his eyes for losing you

When I look, he watches me
While he’s contained, I think I’m free
In his world, I’m sure he’s fine
But through the glass, he’s stalking mine

He seems like me in many ways
When we’re standing face to face
I feel a hint of sympathy
Damn his eyes for losing me

He’s in my bathroom every night
Appears when I put on the light
I curse him to his dying day
He’s never got a thing to say

In the morning when I rise
He’s there with bleary, bloodshot eyes
But that’s his world and this is mine
Damn his eyes – the drunken swine

Here we sit behind our turning tables,
Professing intention to no-one in general,
I hear you say ‘we can make this life fair’,
We agree – You and Me, we are people who care.

Forget all those wars,
Ignore all the taxes and interest and laws,
I know how you feel and I see what you mean,
I study the problem on my Sony widescreen.

Our roles are both criminal and critical – outside the law,
We propose our wee changes little by little,
We preach from our poles with the truth in the middle,
Designing the future with scarcely a pause,
Finding solution within revolution,
Enforcing effect whilst ignoring the cause.

I’ll roll the steel wheels on the tables we turn,
You seal the deals that decide who shall burn,
We never shall meet as hunter and beast,
Small mercy at most – silver linings at least,

The pen and the sword still swinging, still signing,
Tables for hearsay and tables for turning,
For poker and newscasts, debate and fine dining,
Perhaps we could find a table for learning.

Straighten your tie as you sit there and lie,
I’ll sit by you, smoking and drinking and joking,
The tables beneath us straining and groaning,
Are turning, revolving – the contents revolting,
The people who serve us, increasingly nervous,
Maybe sorry they heard us discussing their fate.

Occasionally found in safe rooms underground,
We operate, accumulate, dress up the late to lie in state
We spin numbers around, count dollars and pounds,
Order rounds, capture sound, grade, tag and bag
The samples we found

If the tables don’t turn, then how can we learn?
How can we reach the doctrines we teach,
The morals we preach, the thoughts and ideals,
The conscience we feel, the drugs that we deal,
The dreams we make real or the treasures we steal?

Sit by me, my friend – this show never ends,
We can act and pretend that we are each in the know,
We can hide the truth deeper, we creative book keepers,
We turners of tables, we writers of fables – we readers of law.

Let’s keep them all guessing, never show what they’re missing,
They think we’re confessing, that it’s truth we’re professing,
That the tables we turn, we are turning for them!

shit! that was fun! – Let’s do it again

Thank you Kanute.

There is indeed something on this beach neither of us can ever deny
Let time nor tide but love and pride wash over you and I
Our strength is in the time we bide aneath this clear blue sky

Dominance without due providence
Casts motes in your brothers´ eyes
Ignorance born in confidence
Painful lessons to the wise

Wildfire quenched with common sense
Can be a big surprise
when you’re wrenched right off the fence
It’s time to do or die

On a beach, he took his men
His crown, his throne and robe
With one command he showed them then
The place of men and gods

You may forget his feet got wet
When you consider what was done
We are all the same; we are only men
With ranks and banks and guns

When King Kanute so long ago
Used wisdom for his ends
He left his mark – a vital spark
His thoughts of tide remain

Six million ways to end your days
You wonder how? and why?
Be resolute like King Kanute
Or time will pass you by