Family Romance

Come down to the beheading. Whisper obscenities.
The Central Committee awaits you. Red moon ecstasies.

Black cat loose in Fredonia, swaying down by the sea.
Look at her wrists and she'll show ya the red moon ecstasies.

Cross afire. Dance in the heat of the light.
See the pig roast.
Wards of the state sing out your fate.
The ghost in the choir was right.

She lives high in the lighthouse, searchlight on your disease.
Some call her the inventor of the red moon ecstasies.

Cast neither shadow reflection, walking alone through the walls.
Aging like mammoths gone homeward, born at the masquerade ball.
Scythians blooming obscenely, cast in a shadow of doubt.
Bequeath you symmetrical redwood, tropical winds of the south.

Then you drill to the core of the ocean. Statues are cast in a mine.
Diamonds are flashing pale fire. Visigoths run out of time
Demanding dementia unaltared, lost in a forest of cream.
Pyramids diving in greehouses paint you my harlequin dreams.

Red Moon

Written in 1976 at the height of my Nabokovian phase, during an acting class devoted to “the creative process,” I deftly hid several references to Nabokov's work in the lyrics, including the song’s opening (“Come down to the beheading” equals Invitation To A Beheading, and Pale Fire, among others, makes a cameo appearance, later). The second half of the song derives from the Second Movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, and the lyrics were intentionally automatically written, with the rhymes inserted later. Though I intended the song as a tribute to Jaclyn Ebier Hellman d’Eau, onetime wife of film director Monte Hellman and my Gurdjieff guruette, I couldn’t veil my real feelings about a woman I correctly suspected of being a charlatan. I spent a decade under her harsh tutelage, and my early stage play, The Solo Player Never Loses, is about my time in the cult. The script became my ticket back to civilization and its dubious fruits: I was accepted into Marin County’s 1981 Bay Area Playwrights Festival, where the play received a staged reading.