Blues In Bob Minor - Robert Wyatt

Roger’s in the archive looking up casement

Martha’s in the government digging up the basement

Rebel into representative for the voter

Shadow backhencher couldn’t get a word in

Turned up anyway… issues burning

All consuming… drinks in the cabinet

Spent a lot of time just examining the building

Drinks on the house?

you must be joking

Corridors of power cuts toy telephone bills

Long time no see underneath the floorboard

Looking for the roots of the family treetops

Toe’s in the water but you’ve only got ten

Fingers in the eel pie poke around tip top

Tunnelling a wormhole Eartha Kitty catfish

Meadow brown peacock… pupa-larva-caterpillar

Hibernate in winter of our discotheque no

End in sight.

more like a spiral… coil

Or curler… just unwinding… very slowly

Revealing endless disappearing pipelines

Genuflecting… bowing deeply… it

Don’t take a weathergirl to see where

The wind is blowing… what the wind is bending

Isobars are opening… sex to midnight

Cabinet shuffling homeward bound… taking

A detour… rendezvous do… chapel in the valley

Of the blown up doll… that’s not Martha

Shunting in a siding… she got homework

Up to here

Roger’s in the footnotes up to his elbones

Verse and chapter disinterred

Borrowing a bookcase don’t come easy

The weight of the evidence in parenthesis

Beggars tightly furled belief

Heads on blockabeater repetition on the line

Shell shock supertroopers… whirl banking oil palm

Intercontinental drift… over the rainbow

Over the sea to ska rocker skintone

Hirsuit missed a link and that’s not all

That he got missing inna thousand years of

Orthotoxic waste disposal… god proposal

Jealous sky… whatever is a girl to do

To break the service in its tried and tested

And found wanting state of oh!

boy network

Stewardship?

Little Johnny Aardvark never hurt

Nobody… Martha friend and Roger too

Tone down a little… sotto voce… some tall order

Given that four minutes seems eternity time

In the bushed up world of waspish Vsigns

A-sides sui-C-side salads of the bad young B-sides

What’s the point of digging deeper just to lay

The ghost of Sala Hal-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub?

«Don't give up» the dead man cried

«There's more of us than there of you

Soon you’ll all be on our side… forever more or

Lester Young died… 'Fat Girl' also… blowing all the blues

Away side… dust ain’t just dust… trust us like we

Live forever… broken loose from greystone tether

Keep on tiptoe through the archive… we are dead

But you are alive… Martha yes and Roger too

Until you let the gringos grind you down»