Issa's Sunday Service, #22: "There She Goes, My Beautiful World"

Last week, it was mourning the death of a great poet/rocker, Jim Carroll. It's fitting then that this week we celebrate the birth of another great rocker/poet, Nick Cave. This is Cave's (& the Bad Seeds) second appearance on Issa's Sunday Service and, though I promised myself to keep the repeats to a minimum, at least to start out, my extremely biased opinions are showing.


There She Goes, My Beautiful World

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 Johnny Thunders 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
O 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

Anybody who name checks Wilmot (and he's not referring to the talented and generous Eddie Anderson of Jack Benny fame), St. John of the Cross, and Philip Larkin, beside numerous others, is an instant inductee into the LitRock Hall of Fame as far as I'm concerned. Here's a video of the song performed during the Abattoir Blues tour.





This week's poem is from Lilliput Review #31, April 1992, to commemorate the passing of blues composer, arranger, consciousness objector, and bass player extraordinaire Willie Dixon, arguably the prime mover of urban blues. Unbelievably, these are just a few of the songs he wrote: Back Door Man, Bring It On Home, Diddy Wah Diddy, Down in the Bottom, Evil, Hoochie Coochie Man, I Ain't Superstitious, I Can't Quit You Baby, I Just Want to Make Love to You, Little Red Rooster, Mellow Down Easy, Pain in My Heart, Seventh Son, The Same Thing, Tollin' Bells, Wang Dang Doodle, You Can't Judge a Book By Its Cover (which has already made an appearance on Issa's Sunday Service), and You Shook Me.

The Death of Willie Dixon

Late January, a handful of
leaves on a single tree -
the wind.

K. Shabee

a corrupt world
in its latter days...
but cherry blossoms!

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don