Standards of Care: lyrics

In the (ongoing) absence of a website for our band, Standards of Care, here are some of my lyrics for our songs, which we hope to record soon.

*

STORY

Terrace by the road
A life quietly charmed
She never tried to regain
Glories painfully past

Her child is from the new world
A suburban Renaissance
All hostilities fade
Austerity becomes light

Impact questions her faith
The world collapsed in a day
Some order may be rebuilt
The medics don’t dare to guess
Nye Bevan stands in her mind
This concrete future feels cold
Her husband drives without words
They hate the sight of the road

Harmonium out the back
He thinks he’s Henry VIII
The coma’s secrets revealed
Perception changed yet the same
Passion unites us in time
His music opens new space
I question nothing I see
We’re children one and the same

My childhood passed into the ethereal
To him the adult world was intangible
Comprehension rendered me cynical
Youth slowly became unrecognisable
On his death we remembered lost potential
In my eyes he remained magisterial
His spirit revived in our memorials
Strange how lives can be redeemed at a funeral

*

TRANSSEXUAL PANIC

Question one (thanks Calpernia)

Are you a man or a woman?

Don’t force me to identify within this antiquated binary. Actually, don’t ask another person this question. Ever.

Question two

Are you a ‘tranny’?

Seriously, fuck your slang.

Question three

What’s your ‘real’ name?

My name is Juliet. It’s as ‘real’ as yours. Consider the concept: “birth name”. Were you born with a name?

Question four

Are you on hormones?

The fetishisation of transgender bodies, condensed into intrusive questions about hormones, or operations. Consider your social circles. To whom would you ask something this intimate? Why ask a stranger?

Question five

Are you gay or straight?

Your ‘curiosity’ is no justification for these invasions of our privacy. Allow us to explain ourselves, in our own terms, on our own terms. Thank you. No more questions.

*

THEY STILL EXIST

Flat land
Few plans
Small minds
Still life

Step off the train anywhere between London and Brighton. Reading the names of the towns on the ubiquitous screens, you are struck by their anonymity. Exactly halfway between, you pass the padlocked ticket office to the decaying streets. The council’s focus on flowers rather than footholds remains contentious, ever since the Paving Slab Controversy of 1996. You marvel at the tiny buildings, the high street a run-down parade of charity shops. The people prefer to consume elsewhere. Suburbia is for sleeping, not living.

Watch the people on Sunday, wandering around the shopping centre in the next town. A child stands transfixed by a ship, created by James Henry Pullen, the genius of the Royal Earlswood asylum. He cast himself as Robespierre, and his carer as Louis XVI. When the King entered, the guillotine was supposed to drop. It didn’t, but the monarch forgave him, giving him with an admiral’s uniform: humanity survived. The people glance at his Victorian madness and return to the shops, and the apartments that the Royal Earlswood became.

Flat land
Few plans
Small minds
Still life

Pub on Friday
Mail on Sunday
Work on Monday
Nothing to say

*

THE ILLUSION OF PROGRESS

All passion spent in futile protest
Same old labour in new call centres
Middle managers are like Prime Ministers
They never listen, they never learn

Education, education
We studied for degrees in disillusion
Tuition fees guaranteed our servitude
You dropped Clause Four – then sold us all

Misplaced hope in British art and culture
Hollow works that masked a heartless future
Cool Britannia died in Yugoslavia
Peace rallies faded in perpetual war

Open-plan office, read broadsheet websites
Libertarians roll back your human rights
Car bomb deaths barely qualify as news
They’re just statistics – and so are you

*

NOTHING MORE

I conceived myself as an avant-garde artwork
I didn’t want surgery: I wanted to be sculptured
But Surrealism faded into mundane realism
As the body never satisfied the mind

I dreamt of being Orlan, or a human Tatlin tower
Then I spoke for years to psychotherapists
Who momentarily convinced me of my madness
Then I realised: this was the response I had desired

There is an art to remaining intangible
Just make sure that you never make sense to yourself
Disregard any notion of a fixed personality
Explain yourself only through the most vibrant images

Use the body as a canvas for the mind

Nothing more
Nothing less

*

YOU'RE HUMAN LIKE THE REST OF THEM

Penguin Classic in your pocket, plotting adult masterpieces
Work that prompts no revolution is useless in your eyes
A thousand or a million people, still you stand apart
You know the world will yield to you in time

Overqualified in interviews, undernourished temp
You never prepared for the assault of the banal
Their superstructure soon subsumes you
Your insurrection checked

You’re human like the rest of them (human like the rest of them!)

Penguin Classics on your bookshelf, ambitions never met
Revolutionary work becomes useless in your eyes
A thousand or a million people, all the same as you
Unmarked failure: a human’s saddest crime