Heart Remains - Joelistics

The world gets faster, the tempo skips

The mind plays tricks when the sunlight hits me

I get a memory flashed like a frisbee

Thrown from a thousand long miles away

Thoughts go deep and underneath

The ground that used to be beneath me

There’s a restless need to indulge the senses

Just to see what the mind remembers

Dive in, swim through the maze

Hold your breath and let go of the reigns

Caught in the rip and the current below

Mind got movement, mind got flow

From where I stand, the vision expanded

Over the red sand over the land

Over the city and the bush and beyond

Mind gallop over, countless kilometres

To a place where the oldest origins

Where the silent sleeping sorrow is

With a thriving creeping metropolis

Where the hearts are as heavy as the wallet is

In a colony that paints your dreams

With glinted light of the harbour seas

The flame trees in amongst the weeds

The greenest greens in the rainforest valleys

The undergrowth, solar flares

Sunsets spread in the sky like prayers

The rarest flowers cover the ground

Illegal crops support the small towns

A house on stilts in a cane field

And old wood mill with a chain wheel

Insects hum in the afternoon

Like a thousand drummers in a tiny room

And there’s a silver moon that’ll rise tonight

Shine a light along the countryside

Beaches give way to rolling pastures

Wheat and barley wait for harvest

Fibro houses with peeling paint

An old hills hoist and a rusty gate

A garden path, a big backyard

And a clapped out car in the front

And the languid heat makes sleepless nights

Lazy speak, mosquito bites

Old timers who drive the road trains

Rolling cigarettes single handed

Outback pubs in the blazing sun

Fried up grub in the empty drums

Twelve apostles, hungry possums

Empty bottles, ancient fossils

Friendly blokes, racist jokes

And everywhere you look there a ghosts

Lightning flash, thunder crack

Rain come down and the sky turn black

Over fishing trawlers in majestic waters

Blistering winds on a ship wreck shore

Neptune’s wrath with a ledger book

You gonna pay for the fish that your fathers took

And families fear for the worst in storms

But some folk weren’t meant to live indoors

And the horses run, the eagle soar

The car seat’s hot and the breeze is warm

Drive the car south, follow the signs

On highways carved in to lonely coastlines

Move forward, sing the praise

Drive for days to watch climates change

It’s highly likely we’ll sleep in the back seat

With a rolled up pillow and a bed sheet

And we drive with a mess on the windscreen

And the bugs pasty at the speed

And the road runs straight all the way to the west

Where the sea gets down with the sunset

Road kill flesh, service stations

Dry riverbeds, and burnt out cars

Saltpan lakes calm and vast

Colours explode under skies of glass

Snakes and lizards, red blood ribbons

Buried in the dust and the rock and the grass

And the stars in the milky way

Transform the night in a darkened frame

Distant suns and constellations

Shooting stars and the sky is blazing

And the gods they must be crazy

And the gods they must be crazy

And the gods they must be crazy

We are all spangled orphans, shifting fortunes

Channelling long dead spirits

We cling to the coast like ghosts

Sunday roasts, English hopes

Given way tied to an island with a tyranny of distance

With a heart full of gold and persistence

And it’s hard to say what we’d like to say

While Matilda waltzes the night away

Through the blood and the sweat

And the tears and the laughter

The sun and the rain and the thunder

And the creeks and the rivers and the reefs

And the valleys and the fields and the beach

I saw it all clear from my house on a hill

In a country for away I thought to myself

Til the day that I die

That’ll be where my heart remains