1. |
A Snowflake In Winter
03:05
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I like to think that I’m a deep thinker
And I’m pretty sure that I’m a person with conviction
But in reality I know
I’m a snowflake in winter
Blown along on the wind of the latest liberal opinion
No way
Snowflake
Every tut at the newspaper sets off a chemical reaction
And every opinion piece you read
Is accompanied
By a tiny dopamine release
And I’m afraid to say
Exposés don’t necessitate action
Holding a mirror to an ugly face
Doesn’t change the reflection
No way
Snowflake
And believing the general public
Will level-headedly consider
All the available facts and figures
Before rushing to make rash decisions
And form erroneous opinions
Is ridiculous as believing
The late-night polemics
Of ego-centric and overzealous television presenters
Can bring about the downfall
Of a tyrannical president
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2. |
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I gaze down at my navel and see a silver spoon
Oh God I hope I catch my death I hope I die of something soon
The sickly-sweet seasoning of privilege is in everything
Is in all my fattening food
I’m a glutton for nourishment
And I’m ready for my punishment
I’ve tried and I’ve tried
To justify the advantages I’ve been afforded in my life
But I come up short every time
Freeze and seize my assets
Share them out amongst the needy
Despite all my self-righteousness
I know that I am far too greedy
I cannot reconcile
My actions and beliefs
So I put myself on trial
And I find myself guilty
Doctors complicit in denial
May diagnose a malady
Dish out potions and prescribe
Cognitive behavioural therapy
But…
All the St John’s Wort in the world
Will not cure my weltschmerz
Some things are meant to hurt
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3. |
Mink Skin Coat
04:20
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You know how to push my buttons
Because you were the one who wired them in
And you know where my skeletons are buried
Because you helped me dig the graves
And I’m afraid
I’m wearing my ugliness
Like a shameful, slaughtered mink skin coat
And you know…
And you know
Every fettered fibre and follicle
Because you stitched and sewed the seams and hems
And when will
When will it end?
Where and when will I be stung by the inevitable sting?
I live in hope
I live in fear
Of regretting letting you get so near
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4. |
Melting Butter
05:15
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5. |
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He was late to the club
All guns
Studs up
Ill judged
Threw out
Threw up
In a doorway
Painted the pavement in an artful arrangement
Of tasteless Chinese takeaway
And everything was hazy now
Yes, so very hazy
He explains this to the ladies
And gentlemen of the jury
Before gingerly
Continuing his story
A pretty peacock primping and preening
Puts on her makeup ready for an evening out
On the town
She was a sitter
A pea roller
Anyone who was there could have told you that
And he swears she looked older
Stresses again to the ladies and gentlemen of the jury
Surely they agree she looks at least 18?
Anyway, she played hard to get
Tried giving him the cold shoulder
But the power of persistence paid off in the end
Eventually
He broke through
Her defence
She pirouettes light as a feather
She was happy that Greg had left with Heather
But now she was on her own
No charge left on her phone
But luckily a bloke she met outside
Offered her a lift home
Bra strap snapped
Backline breached
He made the sweetest of contact
A real peach
Top corner
That girl was someone’s daughter till you warned her not to scream
That girl was someone’s best friend till you forced apart her knees
Now she’s nothing, no one, frozen, please
Wake up, wake up, this isn’t a dream
She screamed
"Someone help me"
Due to a lack of physical evidence everything rested on her testimony
Her word against his
“It hurt,” she said, exhausted
The only words she had left
“It hurt,” she said
And then the attorney for the defence
Asked the question
Everyone was thinking
“Why did you get into the car with him?”
She hung her head
In shame
She was starting to think
That she was the one to blame
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6. |
The Perfect Ending
04:54
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Through all the cutting and chopping
The seeds had been plotting their revenge
Biding their time
Until the wells had run dry
Conspiring with the sun to fry
All the edible vegetation
And leave behind
Only the most aggressive creepers and vines
A panoply
In the canopy
Started to advance
Towards the concrete grey of the city
Unable to retreat
It was an easy victory
An ignominious
Defeat
This upright fleshy parasite had been incredibly short-sighted
Try as they might to shrink-wrap the creeping sense of doom
Convince themselves the years of warnings would never come true
Focus their attentions on upgrading their iPhone 21’s to the brand new iPhone 22
The holes were too big
The boats too few
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7. |
The Leaking Ark
04:56
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What if all the animals were given Christian names?
If we anthropomorphised them all to some degree
What if every baby deer essentially became
A Bambi?
Every fattened and shackled sow a Peppa Pig?
Every fish a Nemo or Dori
Every rabbit a Peter or Buggs
Every duck a Donald or Daffy
In every pond lives a Kermit Frog
We gather around our plates
To mourn every morsel of microwave steak
Every cheap piece of meat feels like a dearly-deceased member of the family
My bird, Susanne, just choked to death on a Tesco carrier bag
As the oil spilled into the reef it was curtains for Tina and Keith
Margery screamed in desperation as her baby was taken away after 3 days and
Barry’s burrow
Was excavated
To make way for a basement extension
Which was to house a taxidermy collection
We gather around our plates
To mourn every morsel of microwave steak
This monkey reminds me of my father and now it’s getting harder to apply the mascara
A bolt through the head
A leash around a neck
Now dance for me on your hind legs
Pingu lost his igloo
Dumbo lost his tusks
And other such quips – you get the gist
I’ve just run out of cute ways to say I think the human race is fucking disgusting, mate
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8. |
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How can I be expected
To care
About an abstract and nebulous problem like a dying planet
When I’m forced to queue for over 20 minutes
To replenish my cod-liver oil stocks at the chemists?
Let’s discuss the merits of our lunches in minute detail
Complain how a particular colleague failed to reply to a particular email
I will seethe at inconveniences as long as I’m able
And try to forget all the famine until it touches my table
Content to reduce perception to a singular pixel
Content to let all sights inducing feelings of guilt become blinkered
Nurse and nurture your grudges
Spend time trying to right minor wrongs
Muddle along as bombs melt in the sun
Did you believe the bell-bottomed free-loving tree-huggers? No, I didn’t either
It kind of felt like we should maybe do something but in the end doing nothing seemed a lot easier
As we fell to our knees and pleaded a woman in a white coat screamed at us
“You fools! A virus cannot reason with a fever!”
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9. |
The Woman In The Moon
05:26
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“Dieu merci je suis dans la lune”
Whispered The Woman In The Moon
To herself as she looked down
Watched the final flames die out
Distant booms, screams and shouts
Had all gone silent now
Tentatively
She made her way across the vastness
Swimming breast-stroke through the blackness
Until she landed in the wasteland
Thinking, “how could I let this happen?!”
She admonished herself in bewilderment
But in reality, there was nothing she could have done
There is no war fought
That can ever be
Truly won
Taking great silver strides across scorched skies and dry oceans
She remembers fondly back to a time when she would gleefully
Shift the sea
Far beneath her in great tides and motions
This gave purpose to her existence
But she’d been restless and depressed for what she guessed must have been a millennium
Now the loneliness of this peregrination
Stung yet more tears onto her face, indeed
Rivers flowed down her cheeks
Replete in abject misery
She wandered onwards aimlessly
Staring out across the monochrome
Dust and ash between her toes
Continuing to cry until her eye landed on a shard of bone
From who, or what, she didn’t know
But she resolved to give this poor soul a proper burial
After a few minutes of digging
She cried out at what she’d found
Tiny seeds!
Tiny sprouts!
Tiny seeds!
Tiny sprouts!
Astounded
Dumbfounded
New life underground
After a few weeks, new shoots and leaves began to open like capillaries
The moon, high above
Beamed its approval
“Mon amour est né de nouveau”
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Cassels London, UK
A two piece band comprised of two brothers.
Music for misanthropes and malcontents.
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