Wednesday If Not Before

And through all the salutations, all the niceties, all those proclivities
In his bright eyes I saw dead leaves, rustling loudly, masked immobility
And for all the love they laid on him, undoubted, unrepentant
He nodded, slow and drooling, proud but grueling, some nouveau covenant
Will they ever really find him? The monument they think they see?
Will he ever really find himself, beyond all those proclivities?
There is nothing in the something, not the other way around
There is vastness in the silence, but they beg to hear the sound

And many Suns have passed before across this span of sky
And surely there’ll be countless more to brighten future eyes
And what came first might sink its teeth to fight Time’s tearing grasp
But Time’s eye’s on what’s next and never contemplates the past
And all the time we think on not what’s next but what comes last

RIP

The founder of Mellow Mushroom Mike Reeves has passed away at the age of 69.

Reeves also help start Smith's Old Bar and Fox Brothers BBQ.

Here in sleep, in dream
Your apparition softly sings
And my desire wells, it's true
To give what I can to you
That in waking I might be with you

For floods sake!
Chase the higher ground
I’ve faith that there’s a higher ground
I’ve not seen it but I’ve heard the sound
Of that ground, as it wakes
Awakened by the stakes we stake
And screaming through quakes that shake
My god, it’s tearing! Or colliding?
Regardless which, I feel the biting
Chasms gape, mountains climb
The plates want this in their own time
But we, alas, don’t have god’s time
So let’s speed it up and make it mine!
For floods sake!
I don’t have time for that
I’ll not drown like some stupid rat
You say I’ve made the water’s rise?
My fracking’s made the mountains cry?
The might of man is that of gods
What are odds when we defy all odds?
But what we make we take in blood
For floods sake, f**k, another flood
And think us devout sons and daughters
To make mother both sacrifice and alter

I swallowed the pill
I trusted the doctor
But still I was ill, a snake oil adopter
I’ve heard trust is a crime if it’s not placed in reason
But have also been told everything’s got a season
So, what is it? Black and white or all gray?
Will we be freed by logic? Or buried by faith?
Is the divine city still perched on the hill? Or perhaps all that’s good is condemned to the mill?
Or perhaps all that’s good is like beauty defined, the eye that beholds redecides every time
If good is not rock, then, but ever shifting scree
Perhaps what we think as sacrosanct is a plea?
Perhaps what we think as a truth is misplaced
Perhaps we refused food for fear of the taste

Beneath his tethered eyes
the drones unrepentant spun
He did not seem to notice though
without sight swarmed the deafening hum
And though it stank, repugnant
his daft gaze was not encumbered
A ripe rot ran its rancid course
his thought was duly plundered
But what could cause such blindness
when the waste is laid bare, churning?
When faith waylays the abject object
he might find delight in burning

Alas! Though weathered quite the tempest,
Prevalence in the storm,
Against the manic pressure honed to point then squandered on the thorn,
The finest blade still roughs upon the sands of time, forlorn
The sick still stinks in gutter, a familiar shutter, weather worn

And of that man Time, we warned you
Can you not feel him stirring?
What came once must come back again
The rusting cogs are turning

First Wednesday If Not Before live show, May 5, 2006 @ South Of LaPaz, Vinings, GA.