Businessmen - Carla Bley, The Jazz Composer's Orchestra

JACK:

Businessmen deeply awake

Sleeping like spinning tops

Corner the smalltown mastoid market

Their uvulas hopping mad

Beneath boney earache profits

Punished by being kept alive

Sure of the past at last

Always a little sorry

About reality

JACK I (an issue forever):

Worshipping whatever they find

At their feet

Jack ii:

Suspicion bursting innocently

I & II:

Upon the guilty

'Jack's traveling band'

Are they looking for something

They can’t find

Or are they looking for something

They haven’t got?

'Phantom music'

Impatience’s high patience

Politics nothing to look at

When someone is talking to you

Jack i:

Drifting into hypnosis —

Jack ii:

Outstaring the therapist to outstare —

— Eyelids cataleptic —

II:

— The therapist or so it would seem —

— Widely open and fixed —

II:

— Bodies so tired they can’t come clean —

— Raging pale with endurance —

II:

— All insurance a murder plot —

— All the way to the hill

II:

— A goat not something easily got

I & II:

The sun deeper and deeper in debt

Exposing their rancidly calm minds

To moonlight