Is This It For Myths?

Image borrowed from Yahoo

IS THIS IT FOR MYTHS?

Our generation back in 69 had its lunar landing,
Those crazy, bouncing moon men,
When decent myths outside madness
Were very hard to come by.
Men from the Apollo, moonshot only once,
Just one return and that was all she wrote.
A giant step for all and a bag of sandy rocks.

Who remembers Pioneer and odyssean Voyagers I and II?
Did Saturn's icey rings and misshapen moons
Make Voyager all the rage? Did Ganymede delight
When Jupiter's wicked orange eye was startling?

Shoot! I dunno.
Why am I so nervous and jumpy?
Is it the future that disturbs me?
The desperate present?
Insomnia from memories of yesterday?
I dunno.
The noise from the freeway is constant now.
There's machinery crowding around me while I pray,
Rigid apparatuses, steel, brick and glass
Between me and the living earth.

I knew when I took the 100th cigarette of 1993
I knew inside I was not at peace within --
As I placed the Marlboro longhorn on the outskirts
On the chapped brown on the rim of the quick
And stuck the barrel into the flare of the butane castaway:
The stars and stripes, man, they were a-waving,
BRING OUR TROOPS HOME SAFE HOME TO US, it raved.
From where this time? Ha ha, from where, from where?
Shit! What a drag it all becomes!

Civilized politicos are out to ban my culture,
Again!
Too much gore, sex too rich,
Again!
Somebody wants control of my perverted psyche.
If it wasn't enough that Caulfield's F.U.C.K.
was raked and scraped
from the brick furnace of my brain,
By wall-eyed book burners from the heartland,
About mid-election year in 1968,
When Slaughter on Tenth Avenue had become reality.

Hallelujah or Halloween?
Christmas is making too many demands on me.
Rushing to jubilation,
Crashing through the festive deadline,
Joyous intoxication to my health.

On Halloween -- as I recall --
Emperor of film escaped his coma.
Taken with the common folk, the real clowns,
with peasant pans and dancing maenads--
Can'ya see him, man, with those maenads dancing --
Fellini fled this great feast,
On Halloween, he left behind Satyricon.
Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

On Halloween
River Phoenix
Bit the Dust
At the portals of the Viper Room
On Sunset Boulevard
Across from the Whisky a Go-Go,
Bucking like a rodeo skyboy.
His sister, Rain,
Fell upon his flying body,
Convulsing like the Snake,
OD-ing on Speedball or XTC.
Vegan, they say,
took such good care,
now flown
To his own private idaho horizon.
On Halloween 1993.

Frank Zappa, 52,
Over the land in the valley.
Lewis Thomas, instructed at last by nature:
Where are the mothers of invention
when you really need' em?

This is it for myths.
This is it for myths.


David Gilmour