Complaint Of The Skeleton to Time

Continuing with our re-visit and amplification of the Willner-Minzer  Lion For Real – see here, here, here and here

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

here‘s another early (1949) lyric – “Complaint Of The Skeleton To Time”

Sleeve note -“1949 lyric influenced by Thomas Wyatt’s “My Lute, Awake!” & Wm Butler Yeats  “Crazy Jane” – part of The Shrouded Stranger of the Night concept conceived same time as (Jack) Kerouac’s Dr Sax. Gary Windo’s free jazz sounds a variant of drunken Mexican Day of the Dead dancing skeleton band”

Take my love, it is not true,
So let it tempt no body new;
Take my lady, she will sigh<
For my bed where’er I lie;
Take them, said the skeleton,
But leave my bones alone.

Take my raiment, now grown cold,
To give some poor poet old;
Take the skin that hoods this truth
If his age would wear my youth;
Take them, said the skeleton,
But leave my bones alone.

Take the thoughts that like the wind
Blow my body out of mind”
Take this heart to go with that
And pass it on from rat to rat;
Take them, said the skeleton,
But leave my bones alone.

Take the art which I bemoan
In a poem’s crazy tone;
Grind me down, though I may groan,
To the starkest stick and stone;
Take them, said the skeleton,
But leave my bones alone.

Bones, bones, bones – it’s a perennial (eternal) motif

Here’s (from 1996) the Ballad of the Skeletons

Here’s Broken Bone Blues

& more bones tomorrow!