Bad Seeds

For Nick Cave - Australian


He croons like a singer
back in the forties
makes a suit and tie look cool

brave performer, takes tragic themes
turns a soap-opera heroine
to Lady of Shallot drowning

decades filling stages left bare
by the 'Sex Pistols' and 'David Bowie'
never bowed to public taste
an artist of the eternal now

always playing Moon's dark face
devil's advocate in human form
subterranian plutonian poison
bringing it home you

rips open the guts of everything
lances the wound draws out the pus

finds a hope-seed in the dark
a tiny glimmering of human hope

perennial troubadour
gothic high-priest, obsessed
with antithesis, biblical mythology
bearer of a strange kind of fruit
horror high-art, beastly visuals
chord structure, mediaeval
Berlin stages reverberate
abyss's of murder, regret, suicide
and eternal war - society's disease

raging in black invariably
incredibly tender, son never lost
just had to be, on the other side
of the world, where wars spawned
Hitler born, burning crosses
of Ku Klux Klan
where cradles of rascism
grew bad-seeds.



Pamela Sidney 1995