imagine those pilgrims to the New England at their first harvest festival - the Lammas. You can still see it as they would have done – the wild, pagan and beautiful new land. Wish you were here RICK "That was the first card. I'm following his trail - a little cold now. "Those sky-blue eyes that look right at you". They saw all this…But it's just another old world now. ….The Lammas. Why does it make me think of "The Crows in the Cornfield" - Van Gogh's suicide note?…. "Taxi for Mr. Jaeger!" Time to go." Turning away from the land of my blood A cold refugee on a staggering ocean We stood upon the shore in the talons of winter To raise a cup of wine For those we left behind Born to die in regions of sorrow Crimson and gold in the Valley of Oak The traces of dawn are rising from the river The sun scatters stars on the shimmering leaves Above the singing cornfield Burns in glory, burns with hope The harvest of our dreams The harvest of our dreams I still dream of the pain of the life in the streets The grey, empty eyes of the weary and broken All of them were lost in the wake of my vessel The lesson of my soul To learn to live again I am born once more in reach of tomorrow The touch of this world is like sun on my skin And the light of this world is cornflower blue The world that was promised in the book of creation Fades the faint horizon to promises of joy This land is for our children This land that fell to me We did not come to conquer We came here to be free And the new king is crowned and Elysium found And his throne in the meadow is glowing with flowers We are reaping our fortune, the blessing of life And raising up our harvest Of bread and honey wine We hold it to the sky Into the perfect sky Into the perfect heavens Into the perfect sky

If this is the Big Apple, maybe Manhattan is Avalon! There's a guy who lives in the basement of the apartment block where I'm staying – The caretaker, I think. Been telling me about Carl Jung, Myths, archetypes and dreams; a whole inner world that we hardly know. Wish you were here to see it all RICK "There is a whole other life of connections and symbolic drama going on just beneath the surface of our existence. But he certainly couldn't have seen it; playing The Fool to The Wounded King. I'm only just starting to see it myself." The heron flies in silence across the frozen lake Across the hollow wasteland where the Ancient King is dying Beneath the pale and frozen stars in silence he is flying Beneath the streets in camera we entertain the Gods Underneath the barren stairs in silence we are praying As above and so below the pallid lights are playing Waiting for the purest fool and purest pity's might Waiting for the healing blade to carve away the night Waiting for the one who comes to serve the Sacred Grail And draw the hidden blood into the light "We may be the ancient ones who feed the arcane furnace But our gold is not the common gold" The secret story of my life remains beneath the ice Beneath the fractured surface where the Ancient King is fishing It follows lines of spider silk that guide the refugee To gaze upon the hidden face I could not bear to see TAKE THIS CUP AWAY FROM ME For I can see my hidden face and cannot look away

Somewhere out in the desert… I don't know what to make of these people. Some days I think they really do have the answers; sometimes I think they're all just crazy. Have you read Carlos Castaneda? Stay here for a while and you might just believe its all true! Wish you were here RICK "They all locked themselves in the commune and took strychnine. Your life must be pretty empty for this to be an appealing alternative. It's all escapism. God or the Great Spirit; it might as well be crack cocaine." You feel the moment when the stars align The time we have appointed to give the world a sign A channel to the higher realms has opened in the sky The one we have anointed Let him lay down and die. HOLD MY HAND AND I WILL TAKE YOU INTO THE PROMISED KINGDOM Open your heart, you have no choice Embrace a perfect stillness and listen to my voice Hold my hand and close your eyes Leaving the world is so easy The state of paradise is closer than you think We need you to come with us to forge the final link I'm picking up vibrations from the Pleiadean ship With lasers shooting from the hip The time is coming to take our final trip "The secrets of the centuries were sleeping in the dust Until the Spirit came to me and placed them in my trust" The Guru shuffling his deck and dealing out the lies "I know a better place than this, Let's all lay down and die." HOLD MY HAND AND I WILL TAKE YOU INTO THE PROMISED KINGDOM

I met this sad crazy woman in San Diego. She was married to one of the guys who went to the moon on Apollo – apparently it's true! She said to me, "My husband went to the moon and someone came back but it wasn't him." All she does is sit in her room and watch TV. She thinks he's still up there… somewhere… Wish you were here RICK "This is no alternative lifestyle; this is the rank underbelly of the American dream. Famous for five minutes, chewed up and spat out in pieces, left alone to decay…That's the real problem with the constitution – the pursuit of happiness does not bring happiness." A minor shooting star has fallen from grace The fourteen days of fame run in lines across her face The ticker-tape motorcade disappears without trace Faint reflected glory left drifting in space The second-hand significance she paid to embrace Across the Sea of Ice, across the Sea of Scales Across the Sea of Nightmares until the darkness fails In the shadows of Endymion The heroes of the skies With Tycho, Kepler, Clavius He holds his head up high DARKNESS IS FALLING The opiated night Raging at the needle and the dying of the light DARKNESS IS FALLING The amniotic haze The film grain fallout has settled on her face DARKNESS IS FALLING The flicker of the screen A power window on the soul, a monologue of death, a silent scream "The dust gets in his hair It makes him look so old He finds it hard to breathe The plateau is so cold And he sees the madness cover me…. Like mould" A hollow bullet launched into the purple velvet sky The molten fragments fly apart and spiral down to die In the space between the Gods and the silent, empty stage Her vapid fever burning up her vacant life Her bitter concrete cage "He will wander forever across the Sea of Serenity."

Hollywood really is another planet. You have to wade through the stardust here. I went out for a beer with the writer on an ultra low budget TV sci-fi. He said he could get me in as an extra. Maybe I'll be "third guy running away from the mutant lizard"! He said, "I sell my dreams for a living, pal – you'd never guess to look at me that I slept my way to the top!" Wish you were here! RICK "In all my dreams I'm playing a part in a film. According to the therapists that means my life is insubstantial and unreal. But doesn't that go for everyone? Perhaps that's why we'd all love those benign and noble aliens to arrive in splendour and make all the petty cares and dross of our lives fade into insignificance." High upon the silver screen the silver dreams are shining The pioneers are breaking through their fragile silver lining And floating through the bright array of psychedelic stars Drifting in the shadows of the Demon Moons of Mars The Trekkie is a form of life But not as we know it He knows how much we care about the dying planet's plight And fear the lonely Theramin that haunts the desert night He's raining down an avalanche of polystyrene rocks And flies between the planets in his painted cardboard box And how we laugh to see the tin can robot flip his lid And hide our eyes to pacify the monster from the Id Our hero crosses light years just in time to save the day Dispatch the mutant lizards; send the Daleks on their way Our paranoid projections spiral outward to the galaxies The flight of our imagination has nowhere left to go For a moment do we stop and think What they would make of us? Our childhood fears and photo plays projected on the skies And this is what we've dreamed of, the greatest day in history The moment when the earth stood still And turned to look on high Descending through the cloud-base in their majesty and light They've come to take their children home To put the record right And so we dream the dreams of fools, a dollar at the door The popcorn and the ice cream cones abandoned on the floor The glowing pictures in our heads, the music in our ears Back to face the daylight and our primitive confusion Our heavy hearts and eyes turn to the heavens Trapped within our cell of history We cannot scale the prison walls of space and time The dazzling future we will never see Never see… "KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES!"

An old burned out wreck of a guy came up to me on the streets of San Francisco the other day and said, "A dollar for the secrets of life, son!" So I'm streetwise, I'm nearly 22, I gave him a dollar! And he wouldn't stop. I should have written it all down. When I came back a few days later they told me he'd collapsed and died just a couple of hours after I'd left him. Now nobody has the answers but me. Wish you were here RICK "So Jerry's dead and Montana's moved on. The fog rolls in from the bay and everything is still. We're all looking for salvation, to be washed clean; all searching for something to redeem the terrible empty spaces in our lives… All that we've lost or never had. But maybe we're all so intent on being saved from death and pain that we forget to live. Perhaps there are some who can do both. If so, I'm not one of them. I'm just like Horselover Fat, sitting watching the TV, waiting for a sign." The city scrapes the heavens like a brilliant shooting star With its towers of crystal, a lattice of light, An anthem that comes from the streets in the night And a chemical peacock, arrayed like a bride, Solis in splendour with Zeus at her side And the nebulous stray in the gutter Who was grateful for the ride See the lonely lighted window Casts reflections on the asphalt An ancient paper flickers at the glass And you call these wonders commonplace Dismiss them with your labels And their beauty lies forever beyond your grasp Look up to the heavens where the rainbow serpent flies See him burning like a bullet train across the broken skies Shedding ever changing colours in the fading of the night And riding behind in the chariot gold The Emperor of Light And cry my name aloud, the angel standing in the sun He has called me to the final supper of the Mighty One And seated on high with the sword and the scales The sceptre and stars and the coral vapour trails With all the lost children, eyes burning with tears Our rapture destroying the prison of fear A silent farewell as the world disappears In that golden hour I will lay me down And stay the beating of my heart And they'll cover me with a fist of sidewalk dust And gazing though the darkened glass I watch my final seconds pass And know that I have built Jerusalem Where our Banner of Stars is flying in glory

Alaska - Nowhere left to go after this. I look up at McKinley and I think I'd just like to go up there and lie down in the snow and stare at the sky and go to sleep. Wish you were here. RICK Ps. I'm going out now. I may be some time……. "So that's the last card and this is the end of the road. And there's nothing here to mark it, no sign, no small stone in a bleak churchyard. The only monument is a tight empty space in my chest. And I'm too old and tired now to follow his trail into those wild, sky-blue spaces... The crows are in the cornfield." I take a breath Let it bloom into a sigh The ice that lasts forever Melts away into perpetual sky "A young man was lost on that mountain and he's never coming back. And as you may have guessed by now, that young man was me. I didn't die up there in the snow thirty years ago; I just chose the long, slow decline. And I've been coming down ever since..." I take a breath Let it bloom into a sigh The ice that lasts forever Melts away into perpetual sky