O Lordie

 Oh Lordie troubles so hard, on the way to the hospital we listen to young Moby

I mean he was younger when he had recorded the album in his New York apartment

With what we might now consider to be primitive electronic sampling equipment

And an anachronistic but quintessentially of its time electronic piano

Perhaps, I speculate, it was this very primitivism that helped him to entangle with his terrain via the refrain, a milieu of the soul.

He was plundering updating the field recordings of African American gospel folk songs

My father loved Lead Belly and would sing me his version of Cocaine Blues along with the Dust Pneumonia to lull me to sleep

My Father’s versions of these songs are my favourites and yet they do not appear anywhere on Youtube

Lead Belly’s are the closest thing I can find

I believe that the timing and social context of when you first encounter a song determine your qualitative processing of its value.

On our way to see you on the respiratory ward we are listening to Moby

Meandering through the green canopied slightly longer route avoiding motorways

I experience the journey in reverse

And weep the tears for your passing that will come to pass approximately five hours later

My wife beside me as I sit at the wheel, she is fleetingly recalling how we had once met a young Moby over lunch in Manhattan

And how he had talked incessantly about himself and his complicated relationships

I’m thinking he must have been about to record Play

The album we are listening to now as we pass a paradise village pond with a pedalo-like swan posed in the middle

This would have been a nice place to visit with a blanket draped over your knees

As you recover from double pneumonia, except it is a ferocious lung disease

And we are driving towards a cliff edge in the dark

 

Oh Lord this is not to say that my Moby tears are not comforting

Because they bring me closer to the profound sense of kindness that emanates from your very being (soul I mean soul)

Why does my soul feel so bad?

Not even I could see the funny side of singing the Dust Pneumonia at your bedside as you had done for me as a child

It will be my own son stepping gingerly into your curtained dying realm who unlocks my heart’s chamber

Encountering your holographic body in ww2 fighter’s mask troubles so hard

You are straining to be heard above the engines whine: I would like a nice pint of beer and to look at a smiling face

Confusion knits your brow and the hours are all misplaced

Time cannot enter this region where we your legacy find ourselves huddled inside the eye of the storm

The consultant has just convinced himself us that removing your fighter pilot’s mask would be the kindest thing

Time is now flows gently from an egg timer into a beach onto which you are emerging

With an appointment to meet a leprechaun and Oh, I think, there was a youth a cruel youth he lived beside the sea

My father returns once more to himself and I see the old man gently living out his final years for a brief beautiful moment

To say: When we die, we stop, implies that when we live we are going like a wynd-up-toy

What if we are more like a leaf falling off a tree? 

Does a pebble die when it's thrown into the sea and disappears forever?