A poem I wrote about being at sea aboard huge luxury vessels is very glamorous and as a skipper come captain it is so easy to be wined and dined each evening by billionaires with the finest foods and drink the only drawback is that you steadily become an old soak, I worked alongside many captains who became just that, thinking back to a collision at night with JJ the skipper and a refugee boat he had got drunk with a stewardess and gone to bed leaving the vessel on autopilot the similarities to Titanic are on a much smaller scale but just as deadly , doing double dog watch shifts doesn't help instead of 4 hours you do 8 covering for someone or even the milk shift when you start at midnight and finish six hours later dozing asleep is so easy if the auto pilots on many of our crew used to come on the milk shift smelling of booze - sea watches disorientate you I've seen quite a few old sailors having a beer for breakfast as they come off the first watch at 4 am .
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7:19
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7:19
ROBIN HOOD
A song sang through the perspective of a bad tempered old tree the living monument of mystery Robin Hood's tree is by far the most famous tree in all of ancient history a thousand years of seething silent sophistry
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2:18
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2:18
ELVIS
A poem I wrote for the king of rock and roll it's done in a crooning style of the fifties. He was born into extreme poverty raised in a shotgun shack but managed not only to break out of but also to attack the musical apartheid of America he was one of the first to start singing the black man's blues , he went from busking as a bum on Beale Street to having the world worshipping at his feet .
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3:08
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3:08
PAPARAZZI
Every day the paparazzi serve us our blood and gore all freshly sacrificed red and raw no good being a herb eating herbivore what you've really got to be is a cover story carnivore with the stomach of a blood thirsty toreador let's face it the press room's a slaughtermans stable and the editor's desk is nothing more than a butcher's table
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1:49
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1:49
STARGATE
A musing about the Star Trek scientists who make our intergalactic fate sound like a subway ride through a station Stargate .
South Africa