Gamble - Pirate music

It is the season of the death of bumbles.

All buzzy resistless things slam shut into windows or self-exterminate in lights. The season of the endless nights, of TV poultices he who dances, he who sings. The death of miniatures with wings, muddled, and mid-flight.

The word spreads around the camp and the men are summoned from the gold mines. Dead silence. The Inca girls tell string over their knuckles, the healer heads towards the Temple of the Sun. One by one, the white women birth bleeding monstrosities: some are tinier than kittens, all gasp unsuccessfully for breath like creatures spat against a rocky shoreline. No one talks, or makes a sign, although the Spanish shift to manage Quechua, set free again the locked-up Inca prince.

Noon in Potos. It is three generations before one single woman has a baby that lives, centuries until anyone works out why.

Its their simplicity we love their tendency to clean up after themselves, but also the limits on our baggage: what will fit on five hangers and a couple of shelves; our sudden transformation into this. Like loving was a first kiss, the calm-limbed body minus its head, we put our things in order (eyes avoiding the wall art) and shove the emptied bag under the bed. If only there were more channels, and less of a clinical whiff to the air, and maybe real milk, were certain we could make a start. Instead, a telephone call and if theres a dilemma, all the better. We know that.

We can play that part.

All year he gathers in the mesmerising curios, arranges here no here and rearranges to his taste, in its base most eminently solid writ clear in colour texture odour that flower, this fragrantest of dungs though its subject in the ordering to x-fold variations permutations, combinations, Dear! its not quite, no its not quite perfect yet had he fingernails he would scratch his head feathers quite away and then there are always more more things, more glittering phenomena to be appended to his stack to the well-gauged light and shadow of his amour-shack this womanwork is never done they file by, they doom to ensnare him by the ear the eye the nostril, and before hes aware of what is happening the place is a sorry mess he begins the job again; he will sprain what intellects amassed in his tiny skull toying with the heavenly and unanswerable question of what a feathered female wants, what may be guaranteed to bag one and she comes and it is not quite what she had envisaged, personally, in her heart of hearts down the leaf-strewn path there is a better one the flower was a fatal error and suddenly, so suddenly, his work is done; he sleeps the vacant sleep of eunuchs; sweet bird fear the heat of the sun or do not fear the heat of the sun