Monday, 6 October 2025

#318: Masking Tape Reminder

Take a reel of masking tape.

Stick lengths of it along the edge of a shelf, or shelves, across your headboard, along a wall… somewhere you look at a lot. 

Write a meaningful message for yourself along it.

Preserve. 

Refer back to it whenever that message is needed.


Along the shelves in my imaginary office-slash-writing room:


There She Goes, My Beautiful World by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds


The wintergreen, the juniper

The cornflower and the chicory

All the words you said to me

Still vibrating in the air

The elm, the ash and the linden tree

The dark and deep, enchanted sea

The trembling moon and the stars unfurled

There she goes, my beautiful world


There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes again


John Wilmot penned his poetry

Riddled with the pox

Nabokov wrote on index cards,

At a lectern, in his socks

St. John of the Cross did his best stuff

Imprisoned in a box

And JohnnyThunders was half alive

When he wrote Chinese Rocks


Well, me, I'm lying here, with nothing in my ears

Me, I'm lying here, with nothing in my ears

Me, I'm lying here, for what seems years

I'm just lying on my bed with nothing in my head


Send that stuff on down to me

Send that stuff on down to me

Send that stuff on down to me

Send that stuff on down to me


There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes again


Karl Marx squeezed his carbuncles

While writing Das Kapital

And Gaugin, he buggered off, man

And went all tropical

While Philip Larkin stuck it out

In a library in Hull

And Dylan Thomas died drunk in

St. Vincent's hospital


I will kneel at your feet

I will lie at your door

I will rock you to sleep

I will roll on the floor

And I'll ask for nothing

Nothing in this life

I'll ask for nothing

Give me ever-lasting life


I just want to move the world

I just want to move the world

I just want to move the world

I just want to move


There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes again


So if you got a trumpet, get on your feet,

Brother, and blow it

If you've got a field, that don't yield,

Well get up and hoe it

I look at you and you look at me and

Deep in our hearts know it

That you weren't much of a muse,

But then I weren't much of a poet


I will be your slave

I will peel you grapes

Up on your pedestal

With your ivory and apes

With your book of ideas

With your alchemy

Oh come on


Send that stuff on down to me

Send that stuff on down to me

Send that stuff on down to me

Send that stuff on down to me

Send that stuff on down to me

Send it all around the world


'Cause here she comes, my beautiful girl

There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes again


Or: Keep going, keep finding things, keep writing, let people know.


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