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Prologue / Sweeping Tendrils

from Sweeping Tendrils by Superintendent Idle Tiger

/

lyrics

Scrap was sedated
when he boarded the train
The train has come for you…
Taste and smell the yellow book,
Swallow touch and sugar suck
The train has come for you…
Sedative hollow and follow the swoon
And fall out of your century
The train has come for you
Your pain is done with you

I finger the decades that linger as patches
in blasted memory banks

(The audience responds with blank amazement)

You say decay
I say OK
Sooner or later we all go that way

And I said what can I say?
I have been sent from the future to slightly annoy you
I have been sent from the future to mildly disappoint you
But Officer Grimbold’s after me so I cannot stay too long.

Now sleep.
You’ll love it when you get there.
Life cannot go on without a great deal of forgetting.


Sleep is tender under sweeping tendrils
I doze and live a dozen lives, polite and ornamental
Mental illness under sweeping tendrils

The sun sets on the century
You’re everything you’re meant to be
You’re a dandy now

You’re everything you’re meant to be
Financed by bourgeois industry
You’re a dandy now

Scrap sleeps tender under sweeping tendrils
His mother is a rentboy and his father’s non-essential
And he sweeps all over Europe in the 19th century
Transfigured by his travels and the circles that he entered
Scrap sleeps gentle under sweeping tendrils
They’re calling out the witnesses to find out if he’s mental
Sleep is tender under bleeding tendrils

Parasites and skeletons
Eminent in their boredom
The old Victorians

The garden is a punishment
The trees diffuse a lazy scent
They’re all on laudanum

A sudden and surprising flower
Satanic and mechanical
Will bloom to torture them
O Lord. O laudanum.
O Lord, laudanum.
Lord Laudanum.


Vespers
The house
Vapours
of art
Vipers
is there:

What did you see?
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wombat eating cigar stubs from the floor of his chaotic home menagerie

What does that mean?
the cleaner will not clean there anymore

And what else?
William Morris floral patterns papered all around; fecund to the point of depravity

Why?
The foremost critic of the age could not get his head around his wife’s pubic hair

So what next?
The fin de siècle is far from fun but Michael Field is feeling alright. If I were too lesbian lovers under one name then I’d feel alright, says the lad at the station who knows more than lads of his station ought because he hangs round the station at night

What do you remember?
The kissed mouth and the baleful head, the twin with his fingers shot off, the anarchist librarian mother

And what else?
The swish of the cane in a serpentine line, the blush of pallid flesh beneath, patterns in gore as crepuscular creatures creep through the door of my uncle’s botanical gardens

So what?
Heterosexuals are ruining civilization

The end is gentle under sweeping tendrils
Until my brain was in decay my life was uneventful
Scarcely sentient under sweeping tendrils
Sleep is tender under bleeding tendrils
They’re calling out the witness to find out if I’m mental
Sleep is gentle under sweeping tendrils

But Officer Grimbold’s creeping round my head

credits

from Sweeping Tendrils, released July 29, 2019
Voice: Lieke van der Voort

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Superintendent Idle Tiger Toronto, Ontario

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