Going for a Walk With a Line

There's trouble up at Cowbell Barn
The Shadoks are going back to the moon
With rhododendrons in a burlap sack
Resin on a hessian violin rag
All in Helvetica Light

Robert the devil witnessed the nostril
Of an elderly phoenix in a youth hostel
Playing violin up a monkey pine
In a finger painting for Dr Prinzhorn
(Psychiatrist of these parts)

The violin frightened Bimbo the cat
So they put on a tape of the sound of pot plants
Growing, little knowing
That a woodlouse would grouse about that

A call came in from the Empire of Numbers
A government inspector was passing amongst us
Incognito, my little female circus rider
From Exotik Park would have to go

Rainy weather by the river
Snake paths in the grass
The child with a Chloranthemum divining twig
Cuts Alpinism class

Delia Derbyshire, Malcolm Clarke
And Desmond Briscoe sit in the dark
Invoking a spirit mathematician:
Phra the Phoenician

High on his evergreen reputation
Don John's under investigation
Apparently his donkey ratted on him
Because the Don frightened him out of his skin
It's a shambles, never mumble in the brambles

A little Italian opera queen
Is reading a book to the twitter machine
'AAAS Calcul-Geometrie
(Element 18)'

Tunis Hamamet, that conifer smell
The oriental cemetery -- and there's Bill
Explaining pop music to the mentally ill
Stirring mint tea with a Lucifer match
Let's stay a while and watch

Pictograms in porcelain
Sketches of birds, vogel skizzern
Field dynamics for sizothymes
Going for a walk with a line

What a palaver, more's the pity
Death is in Dessau buying pottery
Orienteering, you part the trees
And see three walled medieval cities
And a dragonfly

Meister Eckhart went into the light
And found a desert on the other side
'Children of wisdom', Goethe said
'Make fools of the fools, as one should'
That advice is good

Put down your line, put down your pen
A snowstorm is approaching, friend
Soon it'll all be white
It's paper in the end, and light