Your Father Told Lies And Your Mother Kept Secrets

Islington High Street

It was so very long ago
so very far away
it would last until the break of dawn they said
after all it’s banker’s holiday

One year short of Jubilee
Bicentennial summer was too lame for me
A California Yankee in Queen Elizabeth’s court
with catwomen, batwomen and a beautiful dark banshee

Something nicked not borrowed
something black and blue
destroy everything that’s old
we’ll show you the wonder of the new

That old decrepit theatre
became a circus with a purpose
with long goodbyes and tattered hellos
and the ghost of Ivor Novello

Topless girls dance to the Rollers
Kenneth Anger’s on the screen
Jackson Pollock’s army is in formation
like an ancient Roman’s dream

Something nicked not borrowed
something black and blue
destroy everything that’s old
we’ll show you the wonder of the new

The singer knocked out his funny tooth
with an old radio microphone
you can click your heels until they bleed
you’re far, far, far away from home

Andy Seven Ltd. · Islington High Street

On Your Feet Or On Your Knees

Everything always started out as something
and something always came from nothing
I used to beat a path to The Pussycat Theater
Sunset 'n Western
it’s a Mexican revival house now
from Traci Lords to the House of Lord

On your feet or on your knees

Same story down Hollywood 'n Cherokee
cops cutting work at The Pussycat that’s a fact
swivel recliner seats
‘n the seats would squeak, rock and strain
Amber Lynn Christy Canyon Ginger Lynn
now it’s an Iglesia De Dios

On your feet or on your knees

They got on their knees on the silver screen
‘n they still get down on their knees
either way what can you say
they still end up catching a disease
Triple XXX rated with your money shot
pass the plate Maria in the name of God

On your feet or on your knees

Transfigured Night

I journeyed through the bleak black forest
It was such a black forest
clouds of black velvet
leaves of purple satin
grass like patent leather
in the cool damp nighttime weather

Dogs, rabbits and cats
mice, monkeys of all kinds and rats
some had their fur shaved
paws, eyes and claws
missing from a scientists’ blade

Animals marched along with me
monkeys swinging through the nocturnal trees
cells were exploding in my blood stream
monkeys shrieked and screamed

I reached into my pockets
there was enough to feed them all
some of them fought and played
I was there for awhile
don’t know how long I stayed

Bless you dear critters
for the lives that you’ve saved
but I’ve got incurable cancer, you see
I’m going to die, anyway

And the rats climbed around me
rabbits hopping round my feet
hamsters started to squeak
all the dogs licked my hands
cats rolled on their backs
and the monkeys flew from the trees

All poetry copyright 2025, Andy Seven Ltd.

If Poets Could Fly They'd Be Pissing On You

Smog

We held hands in the polluted gloom
looks of love over our respirators
there's a sun out there
somewhere
the sun and the stars
know the way
if we can see them through
sheets of brown and gray

Smog, smog, beautiful smog
choke and belching sets you retching
gasping and rasping like The Covid Kid
night time afters
huffing up white cocaine
day time smog
above the fruited plain

I can't see you because of smog
all I see of you are signs
in the form of gray outlines
we can't film today because of smog
the mayor hung himself because of smog
dirty air has you crying
this grimy cloud has no silver lining

Andy Seven Ltd. · SMOG

Carrot In The Donkey's Eye

Well the wheels keep turning
engines never quit burning
stacks pumping steam
belching out toxic plumes of smoke
when the week's all done
what's left of your dreams

why ask why
it's the carrot in the donkey's eye

Where are my pennies from heaven
you can't sock it
how do you coin it
how do you get it
with hole's burning right through your pocket

why ask why
it's the carrot in the donkey's eye

If you want to feel like a common workhorse
come one come all
and join the exhausted workforce
but the devil has your back
cause you're whoring out for cash

why ask why
it's the carrot in the donkey's eye

Sing for your supper
and you pay the piper
all the well meaning creditors
all the smiling predators will make you a debtor
for the rest of your life

why ask why
it's the carrot in the donkey's eye

Andy Seven Ltd. · Carrot In The Donkey's Eye

Slumgullion

Four witches stirring up
a boiling cauldron
what's that smell
it stinks like hell
tastes like a bowl of old bouillabaisse and rotting onions
could only be slumgullion

Juliet lies dead
and all the birds have fled
the fish lay upside down
love's labour lost all around
spare the dagger childe it's all in fun
just eat the slumgullion

Willie the Shake
made a terrible mistake
as you like it well I don't
Portia and Banquo didn't
eat it for pleasure
they tried to shoot it measure for measure
just say no dear Hamnet son
pray don't try the slumgullion

Well the nights of midsummer
drive jaded pagans to plunder
Titania my Titania
surrendered to Oberon
just for a sip of his enchanted
slumgullion

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are still dead
but they’re luckier than Yorick
alas poor one just another shrunken head
Ophelia and Cordelia
had as much as they could stand
as Othello mainlined slumgullion
into the veins of his hands

(what a turn up for the books)

All poems Copyright 2025, Andy Seven Ltd.

Longhair Music For Your Pod Player

When I noticed that I had an extra mp3 player that wasn't being used after a brief analysis I decided to load it with my favorite classical music. I didn't have a voluminous classical collection, but I had enough to keep a player full and varied so that things wouldn't get boring.

There's quite a variety of pieces in my player: chamber music, sonatas, opera excerpts, symphony excerpts (not the whole thing, never), baroque pieces, musique concrete, horn trios, etc. I've also included the early synthesizer works of Wendy Carlos, Ruth White and Daphne Oram, as well.

Formatting classical music to an mp3 player is a lot different than formatting rock or jazz tracks because some pieces go over the five minute mark. The whole point of an mp3 player is to keep the tracks brief and keep things moving, so to speak. I'd rather have the three best pieces from Mussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition than have the entire works. Brevity is your friend.

Some of my favorite pieces on my Longhair mp3 player include:

1. Joan of Arc At The Stake - Arthur Honegger. Imagine a German composer writing an opera about the great Joan with the libretto in French! I don't think I've ever heard an opera sung in French, and it's such a beautiful language for opera. Honegger's melodies are so gorgeous and fluid for an opera, too. This is definitely a must listen.

2. Paganini's Violin and Guitar Sonatas. Who knew Paganini wrote sonatas for guitar instead of piano? The guitar beautifully complements the wildly athletic violin passages Paganini is so notorious for composing, and the melodies are absolutely exquisite.

3. Debussy's Solo Piano Pieces. I never knew Debussy lived long enough to record his own solo piano works, but yes indeed, it's there for your enjoyment and he’s quite an excellent pianist.

4. Wild episodic symphonies performed by Eugene Ormandy like the Don Quixote Suite by Richard Strauss, dramatic washes of strings like shifting dunes of sand, or Harry Janos Suite(Kodaly) with its nutty circus sounds or Lt. Kije Suite by Prokofiev, quirky carnival-like UPA cartoon show sounds.

5. Weird, almost jazzy carnival orchestral music like the Petrushka Suite by Stravinsky with its odd, barrelhouse piano and atonal brass section.

6. Then there are the quiet woodwind and horn chamber pieces from Paul Hindemith (who even wrote a tuba sonata that's pretty wild), Johannes Brahms, and Aram Khachaturian.

7. If you liked the nightmarish, horrific music from Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining, may I suggest the works of Iannis Xenakis, Krysztof Penderecki, or Edgard Varese's dark masterpiece Deserts. Great, disturbing melodies.

8. After listening to all these works, I must confess to a fondness for French composers above the rest, composers like Maurice Ravel, Francis Poulenc, Camille Saint-Saens and Claude Debussy. They have the best feel for melody and their rhythms move much smoother then German and Russian composers. There's less rigidity and formalism in their pieces.

Anyway, beauty is in the ear of the beholder, you might find Rossini preferable to Varese or Charles Ives preferable to Bizet. But give these guys a spin, you might find yourself in the middle of the night lying in bed hearing their haunting melodies playing over and over in your head.

All artwork by the legendary Al Hirschfield.

*****************

Two weeks ago I dreamt Jackie Kennedy drove me to a farmer's market on the corner of Pico and Robertson in a sumptuous Cadillac. The streets were filled with thousands of people milling around and shopping. Mrs. Kennedy parked in the opposite direction of traffic, and handed me a large sheaf of bills and told me in her sexy, seductive voice to get quarters for the parking meter. I looked down at the sheaf of bills and they were all hundreds. I left the car and wondered how I was going to get coins out of a hundred dollars. The rich they are a funny peoples.

****************

So, a website called QuoteFancy has two quotes of mine, probably culled from Goodreads, up on their site with some jazzy artwork. This is, as Frankie would say, koo-koo.

The Show Must Go On

Baby, although I chose this lonely life
It seems it's strangling me now
All the wild men, big cigars, gigantic cars
They're all laughing at me now

When I was a teenager I saw this boy from England who dressed like a circus clown, he was a space age Pagliacci and his voice cracked when he sang about the circus. It was something you remembered for a long time.

New Years Eve 2025. All my favorite DJ's on Twitch wished everyone a Happy New Year, getting into the festive spirit which unfortunately escaped me. Donald Trump cheated his way to victory the month before, and any feelings of hope for a brilliant future were dead. The country was going to return to a malaise of hatred, idiocy and xenophobia. I lived in a country that always insisted on doing the wrong thing. The year to come held no promises, ominous threats but no promises.

New Years Day 2025. I celebrated the coming of the new year with a drive down Pacific Coast Highway. Driving by the scenic ocean side was deliciously breathtaking, sun kissing the blue sky and beaming, gleaming against the waves of the sea as I drove down the road. It looked heavenly.

Speeding past the movie star restaurants, post-war motels haunted by John Garfield's ghost, seafood shacks ("All the shrimp you can eat-Best clam chowder in town"), Pepperdine College, The Getty Villa (where I once worked), surf shops, and beautiful gated estates that ran for acres.

Then there were all the beaches of Malibu, Will Rogers State, Dan Blocker Memorial, Topanga Beach, dumpy Malibu Lagoon State Beach and Malibu Bluffs Park with its skateboard ramps and snakes slithering all around the trails. And leave the gophers alone. A little further down there was endless Zuma Beach, followed by rustic Lechuza Beach. As soon as I reached Sea Level Drive I'd turn around and head back to the big city.

Oh, I've been used, ooh-hoo
I've been taken for a fool, oh, what a fool
I broke all the rules, ooh, yeah
But I won't let the show go on

Monday, January 6th. My primary sent me to Cedars-Sinai Hematology-Oncology Center in Beverly Hills. He identified an alarming surplus of white blood cells in my system and set an appointment for me to go in for further testing.

Tuesday, January 7th. Los Angeles was stricken by Santa Ana winds blowing at 100 miles an hour. Whenever we get them brush fires are always inevitable. Winds were blowing at such a powerful speed you could feel the propulsion of the wind nearly blowing you down. When the Santa Anas blow this hard power cables collapse from their towers and ignite dry brush. It happens.

During my lunch break at the medical center where I worked I looked out the window to see big black plumes of smoke billowing out from the hills a few miles away. It looked perilously close, but we stayed inside. I went home and watched the destruction on television. Everything that I had just seen a few days ago, my private paradise, had been destroyed.

Baby, there's an enormous crowd of people
And they're all after my blood
I wish maybe they'd tear down the walls of this theater
And let me out, let me out

Wednesday, January 8th. The medical center I work at is in Brentwood, a few miles away from Pacific Palisades, so we've been advised to stay home that day. Staying home wasn't much safer, though, because parts of the Hollywood Hills were also on fire. Smoke from that fire wafted into my apartment, and I woke up coughing up tons of phlegm for an hour. I also had non-stop dysentery that lasted for 24 hours. Ashes fell all over my car like toxic snowflakes.

The phone rang and it was my doctor from Cedars-Sinai Hematology. My blood test results came back and they tested positive for CLL, Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia.

The news of having leukemia came as a surprise to me because I've only felt a few benign symptoms, just fatigue and shortness of breath. I didn't have any large lymph nodes on my body and my spleen wasn't swollen, which are the more serious symptoms. My doctor told me that CLL is a very slow-moving cancer, meaning that serious symptoms may take years to take effect, so at the present time treatment wasn't necessary.

"In fact, based on your previous blood tests you've had it for years but nobody tested you for it until now", he said.

American Cancer Society: Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) can rarely be cured. Still, most people live with the disease for many years. Some people with CLL can live for years without treatment, but over time, most will need to be treated.

B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) develops from a type of white blood cell called B cells. It progresses slowly, usually affecting older adults.

CLL may not cause any symptoms for years. When symptoms do occur, they may include swollen lymph nodes, fatigue, and easy bruising.

Well...what can a poor boy do? My Altadena and Malibu friends have lost their homes in the fire, so I'll kick down some funds via GoFundMe, LA Regional Food Bank and other charities that'll help them. It'll be a good distraction from the fire inside me.

Oh, I've been so blind, yeah
I've wasted time, wasted, wasted oh, so much time
Walking on the wire, high wire, yeah
But I won't let the show go on

The Show Must Go On, written by Leo Sayer & David Courtney, copyright 1973 Silverbird Songs Ltd/Queen Music Ltd.

Pets With Leaves

One day I was on Instagram looking at one of those beautiful apartment accounts, thinking how my apartment fell short of all those glamorous digs I was looking at. These homes didn’t look expensive at all; that wasn’t their edge. They just had comfortable details my place lacked. Let’s forget the ever-present candles; I never trusted that whole candles in the bedroom gimmick. It’s dangerous as hell. I’ve heard enough horror stories to stay out of that nonsense.

The string lights I already had going on, fine, but what I noticed was an abundance of cushy rugs and lush green plants. Eureka, I needed more of both, in spades. I purchased a few awesome rugs from Rugs.com, which made my place look a thousand times better. I was getting sick of that hardwood floor look, anyway. I didn’t want my flat to look like a Richard Hell movie from the Seventies anymore. But what about plants?

Buying flowers was one thing; change the water every two days and fingers crossed they won’t die on you in less than a week. You’ll eventually throw them in the bin, and that’s that. But plants are a whole different story.

Owning plants is not unlike having pets. No, they don’t lick your feet or claw up the couch, but they’re living, breathing creatures who just as passionately demand your attention. Every species of flora has its own personality, needs, and yes, moods that require just as much attention as your squalling pooch. In their own way, plants are just as reactive to their environment as any living animal. They just express it differently.

Here’s the leafy pets I’ve acquired so far:

UMBRELLA PLANT

The Schefflera plant is sometimes referred to as The Umbrella Plant for its fanned-out leaves. I was instantly attracted to its lemon-lime markings. This plant only needs watering every 10 days (!). If you overdo it the leaves go brown and fall off. The Schefflera is toxic to pets and even slightly toxic to people, too.

RATTESNAKE PRAYING PLANT

The Calathea Lancifolia is a striped tropical plant originally from Brazil and doesn’t like a lot if sun, so it actually prefers sitting in a dark corner. I have it sitting around my dark alcove, and it’s flourishing. It’s called a Praying Plant because the leaves fan out in the daytime, but at night close up like hands in a praying position. By 4 AM they open up again, so my guy must be living by Eastern Standard Time.

SWISS CHEESE PLANT

I like the Swiss Cheese Plants’ real name, the Monsterra. This is one of those plants that grow long, clinging vines that wind all over the place. It’s called the Swiss Cheese Plant because the leaves have cool holes in them, giving it a very mod look. This is another plant that likes indirect light, so don’t stick it in front of a window, where the sun will scorch its leaves. Didn’t know plants had such severe cases of sunburn, but it’s the emes.

POLKA DOT PLANT

The Hypoestes plant is also known as the Polka Dot Plant or the Measles Plant. This plant is generally considered to be the ultimate drama queen of all houseplants. When it wants to be watered it literally plays dead in front of you, stems and leaves all wilted and drooping down. Give it some water and within an hour it snaps back to life! The price we pay for a little home décor glamour. Needless to say I’ve named her Audrey Junior, the obnoxiously demanding plant from Little Shop Of Horrors.

THE CROTON PETRA PLANT

A stunner, a beauty, really, with its green leaves accented by yellow, orange, and red streaks, like Todd Rundgren circa 1974. This is a very low-maintenance plant (so refreshing after the drama of Miss Polka Dot Plant), and the only liability are spotting on the leaves. Like the other plants in this lot it comes from the Tropics and is highly toxic to your animal friends. Make no mistake, this critter can be moody, too, as one website advised, “Croton Petras can be sensitive to changes in their environment, like moving or repotting, and may react by dropping leaves”.

Garden gear I currently use:
1. Garden Gro Black Gold All-Purpose Potting Mix
2. Schultz 10-15-10 Plant Food
3. Prime Life Distilled Water (1 gallon) – tap water is harmful to houseplants, so give them distilled water
4. Garden Trowel
5. Spray bottle for misting leaves. I also use it for watering them rather than drowning them with a pitcher

So, there you have it, my five pets with leaves. To be continued, I’ve got my eye on even more tropical foliage. Have I even mentioned that I’ve been breathing a lot easier since these guys came over? My congestion’s almost completely gone, and these bad kids tie everything in the place together, to boot. Happy Earth Day!