Steven Wells, late agent provocateur

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jun 14, 2010, at 2:30 PM, Johnny Marr wrote:

> Bob Dylan
> Dylan actually died of shame in 1964, shortly after he stopped  
> pissing on warmongers' graves and became a sort of reverse- 
> anachronistic John Cooper Clarke clone without the jokes. What  
> people think of as "Bob Dylan" today is really a persona acted out  
> by half a dozen octogenarian lesbian drag kings, who have perfected  
> a marvellous can't-actually-make-out-a-single-word-he's-singing  
> parody of what Dylan would probably sound like if he had continued  
> his pretend-hobo faux-folkie act into late middle age, dragging in  
> his wake an increasingly smug, flaccid and obese army of Mojo- 
> reading male menopausal Peter Pans with biscuit crumbs in their  
> spliff-yellowed beards, all just a few more years of nightly real- 
> ale binges away from being permanently colostomy-bagged. In fact,  
> that's the one thing modern "Dylan" gigs have in common with the  
> days when he played in front of thousands of screaming teeny-boppers  
> – the stench of piss. But not in a good way.
>
Mailboxes drip like lampposts in the twisted birth canal of the coliseum
Rim job fairy teapots mask the temper tantrum
O' say can you see 'em
Stuffed cabbage is the darling of the Laundromat
'N the sorority mascot sat with the lumberjack
Pressing passing stinging half synthetic fabrication of his-- Time
The mouse with the overbite explained how the rabbits were ensnared
'N the skinny scanty sylph trashed the apothecary diplomat
Inside the three-eyed monkey within inches of his toaster oven life


In my mind
I'm half blind
My inner ref
Is mostly deaf
I'm smell impaired
If you cared
My sense of taste is wasted on the phosphorescent orange peels of San  
Francisco axe-encrusted frenzy


So let me touch you
Let me touch you
Let me touch you
Let me touch you
Where the Ro-yal Jelly gets made


Coleratura singers bringing weeds and social clingers
Hangers-on and fancy flingers
To the dress ball
Mushrooms and bowling pins
Stove pipe hats and other things I can't recall
 From Juvenile hall
We're so unlucky and stuff
Woodrow Wilson never had it so tough
Dairy Queen and Vaseline and Maybelline
Paul Bunyan and James Dean


Allegory agencies of pre-Raphaelite paganry
And Shenandoah tapestries
Compared with good mahogany
Collapsing the undying postcard romance
With feline perspicacity
By the university
That night I held a paucity
Which you deemed common courtesy
I wasn't what you thought I'd be
I shouldn't have invited you to dance


In my tree
I'm halfway free
And in my chair
One quarter there
In my dream
One-sixteenth cream
In the coffee of the Courtier
Of the sycophant assistant to the king


So let me touch you
Let me touch you
Let me touch you
Let me touch you
Where the Ro----yal Jelly gets made

Dan Bern—Royal Jelly

PS: Plaintext only, please.