The written music of a mystical innocence
Unveiled the songs of revered experience
Engraved upon a world of indifference
Untouched by rejection’s critical audience
And ignoring the clamour of no consequence
A Poet revelled in his visions of significance.

Here’s to a life lived in mirrors
Looking at you, looking at you
Looking back at you looking back
Through your glasses very darkly
To Greta Garbo on the phone
Waxing lyrically quite fantastically
About the joys of being alone
To Joan Crawford on the prowl
Couching a cast with every vowel
Telling Marilyn about her calling
And about the bombshell falling
On the emptiness of an ocean
Where no blonde is an island
Not even one in transit to Venus
Or some other heavenly body
Liking it hot and sometimes cool
Recounting their sins so Cardinale
Occasionally cracking a commandment
To a Sophia Lorenaissance princess
Returning home from Casablanca
So beautifully and unusually a suspect
Knowing she’s below suspicion
Lavishing serenely back in Hollywood
Wondering why Anita Ekberg fell
Like the silver dream’s golden foil
For fame and famous familiarity
Rediscovering tee-shirts as she went
That extra length for helpless notoriety
Without surviving such polite society
Or Grace and Kelly looking in
At you looking at her surprise
When stardom started whistling
At that gal from the windy city
Skinning her bucks Madonna style
Whip wisecracking her lady cat wiles
When Doris finally made her day
Inside that very holy wooden shrine
Renowned for famous fickle fortune
By passing shadow’s tripping failure
In the limelight of fantastic glamour
Having it all and loving the clamour
Before the system really damaged her
For toughing it out like Frances Farmer
The Deity from the silver scream
Her voice alone playing Saint Joan
When the mogul empire struck back
With a cast of riders in white coats
Halting a sweet Cordelia on the inside
As the tinsel world bade a shallow farewell
To another Angelina on the flipside
But glamour is as glamour does
So clamorous to a made up self
An’ there’s no clamour like Hollywood
Clamouring for another famous mirror
To see ourselves as others seldom see us
In realms of glittering golden clichés
Shimmering on the scarlet carpet
While worlds spin in awestruck wonder
At the mystic vision of light and shadow
Entranced by the mystery of the alchemy
Illuminating this lower light to heaven
Our senses ripped and vision stripped
By beauty’s outrageous plunder
And imagination’s helpless surrender
To that mirage with hooded lids
Never looking back at anything
Bringing it all to her Bette Davis eyes
And both her Betty Grable’s surprise
Shredding each soul’s futile resistance
Before the onslaught of her Divinity
Traipsed her spell through tinsel town
Draped in black with a golden halo
Stole the show with her red stiletto
Embedded in that wanton poster
Telling the world she won an award
For acting as she never meant to be
Selling it like some reluctant Ophelia
Wondering why they call her Cordelia
Whilst leering at her cinematic feature
Wearing hats of metaphysical mystery
On dreams eternal in a transient moment
Where every sin is an open invitation
To every door with a sign saying exit
Where tough guys come and wise guys go
But looking at you goes on forever
Inside hats of sparkling wonder
In the Hollywood hell of other people
Flashing their bulbs in prurient homage
At the sinning flash of a new décolletage
Of heavenly strutting star slight women
Stealing the show and loving the glow
And straightening out the golden rainbow
Dancing light fantastic on the brick yellow road
That’s the way those winning women glow.

The lady and her sorrowed blues
She’ll be dead in time Christmas
It’s written in her sacred shoes

Morrisons’s never gonna make it
Not even sure if he wants to
Young and beautiful, he’s had it

Jimi was crucified dead mortality
Waiting on a day for it to beckon
His life the stuff of immortal Deity

John Lennon knew it would happen
The appointed time the only mystery
A name writ on solid sidewalk stone

Brian had it stolen from him and us
Epstein’s almost unremarked upon
The consequence of quiet dignitas

Bolan won’t be rolling enviously
The electric elf was nailed on the shelf
By jealously wrapped posthumously

Kurt Cobain we hardly knew him
Nirvana’s loss is earth’s pain
Only the beautiful are self slain

Syd and Nancy in macabre dance
Punk’s Montagua and Capulet
Never had their loving chance

Nothing rises so strangely at all
As perishing young so beautifully
There’s the descent’s ascending fall

Even kings can be holy sacrificed
Upon the altar of a brokers pawn
By majestic majesty’s indifference  

Sacrifice is what makes us sacred
That’s what Death will never tell us
The Collector only does posthumous

So it says an’ maybe even so it goes
Who can tell of that heavenly hell
This side of knocking on those doors.

Doomed to live and born to die
Perishing young and so beautiful
Gone before our eyes could realise
Such visions seldom materialise
In solid soul within our universe

Doors that open and doors that close
Behind our life and before our death
Gathering pilgrims from the storm
Trapping travellers between worlds
Neither here nor anywhere beyond

Song is sound that haunts a voice
The singer seldom has the choice
Compelled by force of nature born
Driven by fortune and worldly chance
Soul releases beauty to endless scorn

Angelic upstarts threaten ignorance
By the sheer ferocity of their presence
The consequence of pure existence
Suffers beautifully for deliverance
From the fate of too much substance

Life is shadow upon the ground
In a moving image of light above
Nothing moves beyond its sphere
Heard in truth and written in love
Heaven descends in words of fire

A single sound can change the world
For each in one and each in many
We listen in hope to find life’s measure
Unseen it can echo here forever
Unheard it waits to release its treasure

Sometimes we’re blessed by presence
Raising our world and our essence
To our highest dreams of aspiration
For our soul and every heart beating
On the other side of our imagination

The future drew him to another self
His past remains our present thought
Now art was never to be the same
In quietude or any clamouring storm
Invisible he was Rock’s chameleon

Dwelling now as he does in Père Lachaise
A renaissance prince in a sacred place
Consumed by earth and death’s own grace
And surrounded by a celestial choir
He’s still trying to set the joint on fire.

Avant garde upon wondrous language
Drifting clouds of searing imagery
Wandered in reams of magical vision
Writ abstract on the naked imagination
Voyaging  through landscapes of rhyme
Beating rhythms of sounding beauty
In those hours before dawning chorus
Eclipsed the past of the dolorous song
Shackling poetry by its ancient thrall
The golden flower unchained the dream
Of brilliance writ in luminous cadence
Reaping in weaves of solitary thought
Traversed horizons of an imagination
Gazing through times elliptical prism
Upon curves of solid liquid geometry
Flowing in streams of rippling poetry
Unfolding nature’s riotous harmonies
In the lonely beauty of a single flower
Surrendering unto landscape’s mirage  
Pouring dreams worth heaven’s words.

Beauty in the breath and beauty is born
Transcending death and transient scorn
On a cold cold street they left him to die
Profaning his name they just passed by
Poetic flesh and bone upon harder stone
His back to earth with eyes upon eternity
Beckoning his soul to that blessed trinity
His sacred words treasured by humanity
All for love sublime of a dead dead poet
Inspiring the worlds true cherished song
With the passionate colour of that flower
The symbol of a precious love for poetry
In streams that flew on wings of liberty
Blessed upon earth and graced elsewhere
Not that he would ever care to remember
Before or after his death and resurrection
So humbly born a poet prince for a’ that.

His angelic soul to heaven was drawn
From waters deep as his golden song
Returning hence to where it was born
Remained in fire as his burning flesh
Perished in flames at the water’s edge
When his sacred heart refused to burn
The mourners wept with pouring wine
Upon the fire-sweetened soul of verse
A poet perished in fire wine and water
A transubstantiation from death to life
Much reminiscent of that ancient light
From darkened fears to heavenly flight
Redeemed our souls from endless night
With dreams of love and beauty bright
Outside the domain of sorrowful strife
In death he sang of liberty love and life.