BLUES IN BOB MINOR
(Robert Wyatt)

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"



(Contributed by Andy E. - July 2004)
AE/ma