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The Long Fianchetto (Darby)

What are we coming to?
Keep buying, betting, boozing and brawling
Palatine plutocrats cast
Quadrille-inflected shade
Sunstruck and blind from the heat,
Watching as your view's disenfranchised
Shaking in front of the box
For an hour,
Another hour,
Obeyed

I won't distract you with life
While you're hiding from the Jack-in-the-Green

I'm playing the long game
The madness of me

Flaxen wax voodoo dolls
Selling their souls for a shiny new pin
Tender Lolita won't learn
A casualty of age
What were they fighting for,
Barbara, Bessie, Boudicca, Mary?
Graínne O'Malley would turn
And she'd turn, and she'd turn with rage

I won't distract you with life
While you're hiding from the Jack-in-the-Green

I'm not happy pontificating
I'm dancing with the Jack-in-the-Green

I'm playing the long game
They're not taking my queen

Happily apathetic
In this atavistic delusion
Ladies and gentleman, I
Present the price of fame:
Vacuous, pencil-thin, sad,
Faded, lifted, no sense of beauty,
After all, what's in a name?

Box-of-tricks voodoo dolls
Selling their souls for a shiny new pin
Tender Lolita won't learn - a tragedy
What we are we fighting for now?

I'm playing the long game
The madness of me

I'm playing the long game
They're not taking my queen

Chameleon (Darby)

Flight, sunsailing, soulsearching,
Fool me, for my capacity
For love, for joy,
For the drowning

Love me
Tigerlily, chameleon
I am the rescuer
None can rescue me

I've salvaged and cradled my youth
Frayed and incorruptible
They never beat that out of me
I'm flying free

I thought I was an island
I didn't realise that you were the sea
I was the kite
Tied to him
But I never knew
That I could fly free

Love me
Tigerlily, chameleon
I am the rescuer
None can rescue me

Flight, sunsailing, soulsearching
You've seen what I could never see
The hope, the pain, and the drowning
Now I'm flying free

I've done some things I might regret
Strange and indefensible
They'd wrung the magic out of me
But now I'm flying free

I thought I was an island
I didn't realise that you were the sea
I was the kite tied to him
But I never knew

Om Tare (trad. Sanskrit, arr. Darby)

Om asatoma sadhgamaya
Tamasoma jyotir gamaya
Mrityarma amritam gamaya
Om shanti shanti shanti

Om tare tutare ture svaha

Om bhur bhuvah svaha
Tat savitur varenyam
Bhargo devasya dhimahi
Dhiyo yonah pratchodayat

Om tare tutare ture svaha

Om tare tutare ture
Mama ayur punye jnana
Pushtim kuru svaha
Om shanti shanti shanti

Om tare tutare ture svaha

Tacenda For You (Darby)

The storm brought chaos
And my brother saw
The darkness of his ways
And wept
And inside the soul of all his other lives
Slept the darkness too

The lightning struck his scripted life
Ripped man from woman
And wife from wife
And what is strange
And what is pure
And what is real?
And what is more than real?

I saw his ocean love
Parched with salt
And familiar excuses
Unremarked
Kaleidoscopic crystalline compassion
Taken by the pinch

Simplified complexity
Complex in his simplicity
Idly complicit in his own life
For what is lost
And what is new
And what is strong?
And what is much too strong?

The lightning struck his scripted life
And ripped woman from man
And wife from wife
And what is strange and what is pure?
What is real and what is more than real?

The Water Road (Darby)

The time has come,
The night has come to claim you.
The folds of time,
Enveloping, restrain you.

Let's get lost together,
Let's pretend I'm your muse,
In the silver circle
I'm falling green over blue,
And I've got stars in my hair

Urania

Do you fear the flow?
Don't break the banks
Or try to dream ashore.
Until you fall like rain,
Pro itu et reditu.

Let's get lost together,
Make believe I'm your muse,
Tidewashed, free, together,
I'm falling green over blue,
And you've got sand in your hair

Urania

And old Mother Moon
Is calling you to me.
We are tidal beings,
Washed out in this neon soullessness

I know life's like the flight of the cranes,
I'm not lost in the illusion.
The bad man plays off war with peace
With a seven up his sleeve.
This paradox impossible
That compelled the Prince of Denmark,
The lie to be or not to be to be
Is a scam that's sold
By loss of innocence.

We lost our way,
And the limelight is all just for show.
Chemin de l'eau,
Life flows by like a water road

Let's find peace together,
Weft the journey anew.
Let's complete the circle,
I'm falling green over blue,
And you've got stars in your hair

Urania

And old Mother Moon,
She's drawing you to me,
Gazing out to Luna,
Washed up in this neon soullessness.

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