PINK ASHES

Here is the text of Pink Ashes. This is a mash up of Ash Wednesday by T.S. Eliot, with commentary by Pink Floyd. This was orginally a collaboration of Janus the Two Headed Dog, namely myself and Esteban Colon. The original idea was to mash up two seemingly antithetical pieces in order to create what we assumed would be irreconcileable dissonance. T.S. Eliot and Pink Floyd go together surprisingly well, so that's not exactly what we got. I'm looking forward to mashing up something really challenging, so if anyone wants to collaborate let me know.

I

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn

Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope

I no longer strive to strive towards such things

Remember when you were young,

You shone like the sun.

Because I do not hope to know

The infirm glory of the positive hour

Because I do not think

Because I know I shall not know

The one veritable transitory power.
Now there's a look in your eyes,

Like black holes in the sky.

Because I cannot drink

There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again.

You reached for the secret too soon,

You cried for the moon.

Because I know that time is always time

And place is always and only place

And what is actual is actual only for one time

And only for one place.
Threatened by shadows at night,

And exposed in the light.

And pray to God to have mercy upon us

And pray that I may forget

These matters that with myself I too much discuss

Too much explain.
You wore out your welcome with random precision,

Rode on the steel breeze.

Because I do not hope to turn again

Let these words answer

For what is done, not to be done again

May the judgement not be too heavy upon us.

Nobody knows where you are,

How near or how far.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

And I'll be joining you there.

And we'll bask in the shadow

Of yesterday's triumph, And sail on the steel breeze.

Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

II

Through the fish-eyed lens of tear stained eyes

I can barely define the shape of this moment in time

And far from flying high in clear blue skies

I'm spiraling down to the hole in the ground where I hide.

If you negotiate the minefield in the drive

And beat the dogs and cheat the cold electronic eyes

And if you make it past the shotgun in the hall,

Dial the combination, open the priesthole

And if I'm in I'll tell you what's behind the wall.

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree

In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety

On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained

In the hollow round of my skull.

There's a kid who had a big hallucination

Making love to girls in magazines.

He wonders if you're sleeping with your new found faith.

Could anybody love him

Or is it just a crazy dream?

We shine with brightness.

And I who am here dissembled

Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love

To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.

And if I show you my dark side will you still hold me tonight?

It is this which recovers.

And if I open my heart to you and show you my weak side

What would you do?

My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions

Which the leopards reject.
Would you sell your story to Rolling Stone?

Would you take the children away and leave me alone?

Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.

And smile in reassurance as you whisper down the phone?

As I am forgotten

And would be forgotten, so I would forget.
And God said

Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only

The wind will listen.

Or would you take me home?

And the bones sang chirping

With the burden of the grasshopper.

Thought I oughta tear the curtain down.

Torn and most whole

Rose of memory. Rose of forgetfulness

Exhausted and life-giving

Worried reposeful.

I held the blade in trembling hands.

The single Rose is now the Garden

Where all loves end

Terminate torment of love unsatisfied

The greater torment of love satisfied.

I never had the nerve to make the final cut.

End of the endless journey to no end

Conclusion of all that

Is inconclusible

Speech without word and word of no speech

Grace to the Mother

For the Garden where all love ends.

III

At the first turning of the second stair

I turned and saw below

The same shape twisted on the banister

Under the vapour in the fetid air

Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears

The deceitul face of hope and of despair.

Run, Run, Run, Run, Run, Run, Run, Run, Run, Run, Run, Run, Run, Run.

At the second turning of the second stair

I left them twisting, turning below.

You better make your face up in

Your favorite disguise.

With your button down lips and your

Roller blind eyes.

There were no more faces and the stair was dark,

Damp, jaggèd, like an old man's mouth drivelling, beyond repair,

Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark.

With your empty smile

And your hungry heart.

Feel the bile rising from your guilty past.

At the first turning of the third stair

Was a slotted window bellied like the figs's fruit.

With your nerves in tatters

When the cockleshell shatters and the hammers batter down

The door.

You'd better run.

Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair

Climbing the third stair.

Run, Run, Run, Run, Run, Run, Run, Run, Run, Run, Run, Run, Run, Run.

Lord, I am not worthy.

Cause if they catch you in the back seat

Trying to pick her locks,

They're gonna send you back to mother

In a cardboard box.

You better run.

IV

Breathe, breathe in the air.

Who walked between the violet and the violet

Who walked between

The various ranks of varied green

Going in white and blue, in Mary's colour,

Talking of trivial things.
Don't be afraid to care.
In ignorance and knowledge of eternal dolour

Who moved among the others as they walked,

Who then made strong the fountains and made fresh the springs.

Long you live and high you fly.

And smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry.

In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary's colour,

Sovegna vos.
And all you touch and all you see

Is all your life will ever be.

Here are the years that walk between, bearing

Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring

One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearing.

Run, rabbit run. Dig that hole, forget the sun.
White light folded, sheathing about her, folded.
And when at last the work is done

Don't sit down it's time to dig another one.

The new years walk, restoring

Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring

With a new verse the ancient rhyme.

Redeem.

For long you live and high you fly

But only if you ride the tide.
The time. Redeem

The unread vision in the higher dream

While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

And balanced on the biggest wave

You race towards an early grave.
The silent sister veiled in white and blue
Goodbye cruel world, I'm leaving you today.

Between the yews, behind the garden god,

Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke no word.

Goodbye, Goodbye, Goodbye.

But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down

Redeem the time, redeem the dream.

Goodbye, all you people.

The token of the word unheard, unspoken

Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew.
And after this our exile.

V

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent

If the unheard, unspoken word is unspoken, unheard;

Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,

The Word without a word, the Word within the world and for the world.

So, you think you can tell heaven from hell,

Blue skies from pain?

And the light shone in darkness and

Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled

About the centre of the silent Word.

Can you tell a green field From a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?

The right time and the right place are not here

No place of grace for those who avoid the face

Do you think you can tell?

No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice.

And did they get you to trade

Your heroes for ghosts? Hot ashes for trees?

Hot air for a cool breeze?

Will the veiled sister pray for

Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,

Those who are torn on the horn between season and season, time and time, between

Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait

In darkness?

We’re just two lost souls, swimming in a fish bowl.
For years and years.
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found?
The same old fear.

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Blown on the steel breeze.

VI

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day

You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.

Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town

Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
Wavering between the profit and the loss

In this brief transit where the dreams cross

You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.

No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices

In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices

And the weak spirit quickens to rebel

For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell.
Quickens to recover

The cry of quail and the whirling plover

And the blind eye creates

The empty forms between the ivory gates.

So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking

Racing around to come up behind you again.

This is the time of tension between dying and birth

The place of solitude where three dreams cross.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older,

Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

Between blue rocks

But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away

Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time.

Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines

Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way

Teach us to sit still

Even among these rocks.
The time is gone, the song is over,

Thought I'd something more to say.

And let my cry come unto Thee.