Last Chance, by Tim Evans

The sea rises.
A woman sits by the shore,
Singing the lost songs of love and exile.
And there shall be fires too,
Floods and hurricanoes,
As the sea rises
And the ocean swells
And the salt waves slap
Against the wet caves
Of our imagination.
Condemned to one last chance.

Why are you deaf and dumb?
Are we the last people?
Did these lakes and hills belong to us
Or we to them?
Is this our honour?
To be the last defenders
Of a wounded planet?

Remember, though…
It was not ‘we’ who sucked up oil from the veins of the earth,
It was not ‘we’ who created moving cities of automobiles
Headlights blazing through the motorways of night.
It was you – B.P, Shell, Total, Exxon Mobil,
Lukoil & Chevron,
GM, Ford, Honda, Chrysler
Peugeot, Suzuki
Rolls-Royce and Mercedes,
It is from your black fangs
That the oil drips
Through your steel veins
That the petrol thrums fast.

Cities are sinking into the sea tonight.
Wind rises from nowhere
Across the shattered beach

And the woman still sits
By the shore
Singing the old songs
Of love and revolt
“Rebel
Rise up
Because it is the last silence
Before the great thunder.
The winds blow stranger and wilder
And the waves are rising”.

And we are condemned to one last chance.
One last chance.

Crows and Fishes by Tim Evans

The stars stare down like silver
On the angels in the snow
And on the angels’ killer
And on the carrion crow.

The old year turns its crooked back
Its bones poke through the skin.
I follow the eternal tracks
Of the twisted shape I’m in.

It was never my intention
To steal away your face,
For in the fourth dimension
There is no time or space.

The hunting dogs so gaunt and still
That dreamed the moon away
Now course the started hare until
The night bleeds into day

You knew it would be hours
From the darkness of retreat
Till your life returned to power
In the power of the street

In the back seat of the car
You pack away the time
And the livid, frost-white scar
Is evidence of the crime.

They thought they could accuse you.
What kind of shit is that?
Slander and abuse you
And take all the money back.

Darkness turns to darkness
As we burn the time away,
The dead year’s withered carcass
Is the final giveaway.

The crossroads and the threshold
In transition must be marked.
So tightly tie the blindfold
Around your bleeding heart

Sliding through the seaside city
In the slippery coils of Time
The Campaign Finance Sub-Committee
Isn’t worth a dime.

A woman’s body, pale and silver,
Fishlike in the undertow,
Reflections of her silver sister,
Breast and belly all aglow.

Time runs at a different speed
At the dying of the year
But what you think we both agreed
Was what you wished to hear.

The old year tilts to tipping-point
The world slides off its back
It dies from cancer, Aids, TB,
Stroke and heart attack.

Yes, time runs at a different speed
Tomorrow and today,
Running down the endless streets
Of an empty cabaret.

Landscapes of myth, landscapes of mind
Of dreamworlds past decay.
The wounded are healed, and the stone-cold blind
Will recover their sight today.

Strange times are coming, facing off infinity
Emergency a state of mind,
Fearful antithesis, fearful symmetry,
Sealed, delivered and signed.

And there was nothing I could do
No mountain I could climb.
Some of it was false and some of it true
But most of it was out of time.

And the rock‘n’roll women kicked off their shoes
And let down their oiled-up hair
You can find them in town any night you choose
Round the back of the iron stairs.

And the tears ran down their burning face
As they pulled out their handkerchief
They stood in the sun under God’s disgrace
No fear, no sorrow, no grief.

It was the wrong bouquet and the wrong time of day
And the wrong end of the month.
No need to go down on your knees and pray
Because you can’t die more than once.

And when the seventh sun fell from heaven
And you could hear the jackdaw’s cry
And the dice man called out seven-eleven
And the starlings wheeled in the sky

And the winter’s silence lay on the earth
And there was no need to reply
And life was death and death was birth
And the stars fell out of the sky.