Surrender

I am leaving home to find home. And I am singing.

A job is a thing where you do something you don’t really like for eight hours a day for five or six days a week in return for money to help you do the stuff on the weekend you want to do all the time.

hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, at times it’s only me. —Bob Dylan, “Every Grain of Sand”

I’m so cold. I need to be beside you, I need your warmth, I need your loveliness. I’m dressed for winter. I have big boots on in bed, but I’m freezing to death.

I shouldn’t be here ’cause I should be dead I can see the lights in front of me I believe my best days are ahead I can see the lights in front of me.

He had told me in those final days that when accepting his cancers, he’d lost his faith, but he also told me that I should never lose mine. That it was the most interesting thing about me. Emboldened, I read to him from a psalm of King David, Psalm 32.

As we do before every show, we pray. Sometimes it can feel as if we’re strangers, praying to find the intimacy of a band that could be useful to our audience this evening. Useful? To music. To some higher purpose. In some strangely familiar way we are changed. We begin our prayers as comrades; we end them as friends finding a different image of our

Looking down on myself from above with the arc lights reflecting on the stainless steel. I’m thinking the light is harder than the steel counter I’m lying on. My body feels separate from me. It is soft flesh and hard bone.

I can’t change the world but I can change the world in me. —SFX Theatre, Dublin, December 1982