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about

A record of an actual dream

lyrics

Prologue
Feeling utterly desperate and bereft
I woke from a vivid dream
Raw with emotion
Palpable images gnawed at my waking
Until I started to write...

I had a dream
I was a young child at school
An adolescent
A parent
Innumerable Me of all ages
With a gap where a Man might have
Become

These characters were dream-observed
As separate individuals
Being spoken to by a final Me
A whole Me
Intellectually integrated with an emotionally healthy Me
So that the child
The youth
The inadequate father
Could be relieved
Their weight of Failure and Incompleteness

In this telling
In this dialogue
The idea of one performance
A story of life and how to love it, formed perfectly
A One Man Show
That articulated to every
One of my life's being
A Holy Spirit, babel-tongue telling
Of the best way
To see joyfully
Each struggle along the way

It was all there
Contained by the dream
In a script with stage and costume set
The curtain about to rise with buzzing anticipation
From all the people I had been
And I, this Me
Knew at last
I could let go

Then, amongst the crowded audience of Me
Another person appeared
My son
A better man than I shall ever have been
And he asked something of Me
Not only had I no answer but neither
Could I understand his beautiful question
He had moved beyond me and my learning

Now with the curtain up on a bare stage
My script lost
And naked without costume
The strains of all the thousands of Me that I'd been about to break
Stirred me into a vortex of whirlpool soul
And I was so sad
So sad
So sad that I
The One Man Show
Was unfulfilled
Because now the performance
Had become the wake to my own funeral

Here I watched the grief of another audience
That could have been
But were not Me

Epilogue
Looking back
The desire to change the people I have been
Has found the will to accept
The person I have become

That person has nurtured
The Man in my son

credits

from Feathers of Faith, released April 6, 2019
Steve Anderson - Dream - spoken word
Andy Wood - improvised piano

license

all rights reserved

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about

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Steve 'Manifold' Anderson UK

Seeds of this collaboration were sown in 2010. Andy and Steve were bumping into each other’s performances at venues in Hebden Bridge. The acquaintance developed over some years and began to find a peculiar shared perspective.
Tentatively, playing together developed into the current work. Steve's death in March 2020 has added depth to work that was always about life and death, his own and ours. ... more

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