al666insongs

I felt like recording something but not writing anything so today I present an 80% stolen work of art: two of H.P. Lovecraft’s poems with one of my songs that I thought blended thematically and the recording of which I don’t think I ever put on the internet for your pleasure. The song of my own however still has lines stolen from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, which are acknowledged with quotation marks.

Picture unrelated.

Halloween in a Suburb
(H.P. Lovecraft)

The steeples are white in the wild moonlight,
      And the trees have a silver glare;
Past the chimneys high see the vampires fly,
      And the harpies of upper air,
      That flutter and laugh and stare.

For the village dead to the moon outspread
      Never shone in the sunset’s gleam,
But grew out of the deep that the dead years keep
      Where the rivers of madness stream
      Down the gulfs to a pit of dream.

A chill wind weaves thro’ the rows of sheaves
      In the meadows that shimmer pale,
And comes to twine where the headstones shine
      And the ghouls of the churchyard wail
      For harvests that fly and fail.

Not a breath of the strange grey gods of change
      That tore from the past its own
Can quicken this hour, when a spectral pow’r
      Spreads sleep o’er the cosmic throne
      And looses the vast unknown.

So here again stretch the vale and plain
      That moons long-forgotten saw,
And the dead leap gay in the pallid ray,
      Sprung out of the tomb’s black maw
      To shake all the world with awe.

And all that the morn shall greet forlorn,
      The ugliness and the pest
Of rows where thick rise the stones and brick,
      Shall some day be with the rest,
      And brood with the shades unblest.

Then wild in the dark let the lemurs bark,
      And the leprous spires ascend;
For new and old alike in the fold
      Of horror and death are penn’d,
      For the hounds of Time to rend.

On Receiving a Picture of Swans
(H.P. Lovecraft)

With pensive grace the melancholy Swan
Mourns o’er the tomb of luckless Phaëton;
On grassy banks the weeping poplars wave,
And guard with tender care the wat’ry grave.
Would that I might, should I too proudly claim
An Heav’nly parent, or a Godlike fame,
When flown too high, and dash’d to depths below,
Receive such tribute as a Cygnus’ woe!
The faithful bird, that dumbly floats along,
Sighs all the deeper for his want of song.

Phaeton
(Aladdin and Ovid)

The Day Phaëton set fire to earth  
Zeus struck down
Helios’ son with a single thunderbolt.
“But how cou’d you resist the orbs that roul
In adverse whirls, and stem the rapid pole?”
Or, so it should go,
As we’re told by Ovid:
Aristotle didn’t call him a comet,
but the stars fell from heaven
at the time of Phaeton’s downfall.
And the sun for several days didn’t rise,
until the chariot, from mourning, returned to the skies
 
I’m not being modest
I’m just being honest
I’m not an adonis, no
but I do have a god complex

””…consider what impetuous force
Turns stars and planets in a diff’rent course.” 

And the world was scorched
because of the chariot’s horses 
who scorned
the weaker hand of he who
was not their master
“Whole cities burn
and peopled kingdoms
into ashes, turn.”
Even poseidon
was hiding
at the bottom of the ocean

I’m not being modest
I’m just being honest
I’m not an adonis, no
but I do have a god complex